“A Hybrid Setup is the worst” | How to get new hires up to speed during hyper-growth | How to not be the bottle neck of growth as a founder | - Job van der Voort, remote.com

 Welcome to a new episode of the Unicorn Bakery. My name is Fabian Tausch and today we will have a look at the recipe for success of remote.com. Today's guest, therefore, is the founder of remote.com, Job van der Voort, who was a VP of product at GitLab before. One of the number one remote companies, so therefore maybe a sign for building remote.com as well. And remote.com helps companies hire employees worldwide by providing the legal infrastructure to hire in the country of choice. I'm not a thousand percent sure if it's worldwide in every single country already because there are so many legal things to check for, but we will hear about that in a second. The company was founded in 2019 and then valued at more than 3 billion euros in April 2022 through the Series C. Investors include, for example, Sequoia, Excel, SoftBank, Vision Fund, Index, General Catalyst, and you raised more than 500 million from venture investors. So, Job, welcome to the Unicorn Bakery. Thanks, Fabian. A lot of things to talk about. Let's start with one question that I think summarizes a lot of the other topics. You scaled super fast from, I would say, 2019 to 2022. A few hundred employees, 500 million raised, 3 billion valuation, even when we today know that that's not everything that defines a company. But what were the things you had to have in place so that you were able to scale that fast and build the fundamentals for scaling a company? It's a great question. I think if I think back about the period in which we grew faster, so in 2021, we grew the team from 50 to 650 people in one year. So in terms of multiple, it is extremely high. I think the one thing we got right at the time was the ability to just quickly onboard people. I think that really is like to scale that incredibly quickly, that was probably the most important thing. And so being able to do that is being really confident about what is the kind of company that I'm building? What is the kind of company I'm building towards? So I have a sort of makeup of my teams. What am I going to do if I scale it up? Where do I need to scale it up? And also just what kind of people do I need? And how do we make sure those people get onboarded quickly enough so that they can do real work within a few weeks? And so we spent a lot of time early on defining what is the kind of company that we want? We had a handbook. We had clearly defined, this is how we hire. This is how we pay. This is what we want to do. This is where we need people for. That ultimately really was the key. But that's given the fact that there was massive demand. We scaled up because there was so much demand, we couldn't keep up with it. And so we needed to hire people as quickly as we could just to meet the demand. And I think our ability to do quickly makes that we still exist today. Because if it wasn't for that, yeah, then if we hadn't hired a lot of people really, really quickly, I think we would be much smaller than today than otherwise. I think the craziest question, these are like 600 people added on top of 50 that were the base. How do you get all these people up to speed while properly onboarding them? Is it even possible? Yeah, getting people up to speed is the onboarding, right? And I think there's a few things that we did well. One is that we work asynchronously, which means that everything is written down. So instead of saying, hey, welcome, this is your new job, figure it out. Or like, here's a few team members to tell you we had a program. It's not something fancy or something. It's just like, read this, watch this video, do this. Everybody, there's a few structural things. Like everybody gets an onboarding body. Everybody gets introduced to 10 random people across the company. And then making sure that we have really clear hierarchy, right? If one manager who has maybe on average about eight reports and making sure that they have a weekly cadence of one-on-ones. Like if you get all those basics right, then everything else becomes really simple, right? I think today our onboarding is a little bit different, of course, as it continuously evolves. But the structure is mostly the same, which is that week one is getting to know people, getting to know the company, and going through all the onboarding materials, which is quite a lot. And it's quite intense. And then if you go through all of that, you will know where to find what information. So it's not like, you know, we're spending a whole week telling you what the vision and mission is. No, that's the first thing you watch is the first five minutes. And then afterwards, it's, you know, this is where we write down these kind of decisions. This is, you know, our current goals for the year. This is what is important, et cetera. That really is it. And then the thing is, it scales really, really well if you make sure to continuously structure it and improve it over time. And so that's what we did. I would love to think that everything went perfect during that time. But while you're hiring 600 people in a year, when you were 50 before, I can imagine a lot of things break. So during that hyper growth year, especially, what were the things that weren't able to scale at first? I think you're just continuously running into the next bottleneck, right? So you're going to, something is going to break. And for the most part, the things that I was worried about were the actual product and how that worked. Because our people grew to that factor, but our revenue and amount of customers, you know, was like double the growth rate. Like I think we did 20x that year or something like that. And literally everything breaks. Literally every single thing that you have in place when you do a little bit of revenue breaks when you 20x that. And so everything, everything just broke. Our product where we, you know, we relied on some spreadsheet in some thing that was never used. Suddenly that thing became, you know, a spreadsheet with a million rows. So that, you know, you had to suddenly build an app for that, literally everything. Like there's enough examples. I think the most difficult thing is that your company is not the same. Every time you double, it's a new company, right? Because half or more than half of the people are completely new. And so if you double the company every month, then every month you have an entirely new company. And so you can't really rely on like having a history or like even a mutual understanding of anything. You constantly have to reinvent the wheel. When people join a company, they assume that everything that's in place is there for a reason. It's like a baseline assumption, right? You come into a company and they use three apps. You're like, okay, they probably spent a lot of time thinking about that. But that's one that's just not true, right? Most decisions are arbitrarily taken and then they just become the decision over time. And so when you grow that fast, you get that plus like, oh, it's growing so fast. Is it my role at all to address this or to change this? When you're really small, everybody knows, oh, it was just an arbitrary decision. And so there were many things early on that would, you know, we took a random decision very early in the company when we were maybe 10 employees. And then we're now 500 and it made no sense that that was still the case, that app or that decision, yet it wasn't moved. And because the company was so focused on scaling, just making it work at all, like making sure that the, you know, houses of cards didn't fall over. And we had all these like little leftovers here and there. And some of them took years to solve. And I am sure there's still some leftovers here and there of decisions that we took on a random afternoon. Then suddenly, you know, are now seen as like, oh, this is an important part of how we function. Whereas we, you know, we might as well done anything else. How did you ensure that you are not the bottleneck while growing the company? Well, I avoid becoming a bottleneck. I think that to me, it's very stressful to being the bottleneck. So and to avoid it, you have to just delegate actively, give people significant ownership, and it should be sufficient. So that there's no, you know, I'm not the final approver on anything. I'm not the final, I'm not, I don't give the final check on almost anything. And only trapdoor decisions, decisions where once taken them, you can't go back. And only those that are incredibly impactful, those end up with me. And so there's very few of those. And so for most decisions, the company just moves by itself. And like that we established really early on. We said, you know, one of our core values is ownership. So we expect you to take decisions. And we had this framework, this trapdoor framework, where we said, well, if it's not a trapdoor decision, then just take the decision just by yourself. It's barely worth discussing something in your team, because, you know, the overhead of that is probably more costly than the cost of reverting it, right? Or the cost of like the time that you need to take the decision versus reverting it. So that helped a lot. Yeah, that's interesting. Just reminded me of an example that I recently saw on Twitter that Shopify now integrated a meeting cost calculator in the calendar and therefore deleted thousands of meetings before because they realized, oh, shit, they're way too expensive. We can't do that. So like reducing the complexity of making decisions or just meeting for the sake of meeting what we had a lot, I think, during the pandemic. And therefore, interesting to reduce the complexity here. Coming back to the part of delegating a lot, how do you like, it's super hard for me to grasp when you're like growing from 50 to 600 people. I can imagine that a lot of people came back and were like, hey, how would you decide that and are coming to you as a last resort because they're also sometimes overwhelmed. Just totally normal. So how do you then make sure, like, how do you then enable these people so that they take the ownership and they feel comfortable or as comfortable as possible to do the decisions instead of just always coming back to you and therefore you being part of all the decisions yourself? It's a matter of creating the culture where this is normal, right? Like there's no other thing you can do. Like it can't be that people come back to me or even their manager because the company is growing so fast and so many decisions have to be taken that it has to be part of the DNA of the company. And so it was one of our core values and we kept repeating that and we keep saying that and we made sure to never like punish people for taking the wrong decision. We celebrate moving fast above all. And that is what we remained focused on. And I think that's the most important thing. There's no other good way of doing it, right? Like we make it part of our performance reviews. Like what does good performance look like? Well, you make sure to unblock yourself. You make sure to move fast above all. If you're very consensus seeking, then you're going to be really ineffective and it's going to be really obvious to everybody around you. And so I think that's ultimately the way. There's no other trick to doing that. Yeah, and setting the right example helps a lot, right? So everybody that reports to me, they always get, and I always say very directly to them, you have all the freedom in the world to do your job. I expect that if you get stuck, you don't sit around waiting to meet with me or something like you will do whatever is necessary to get unstuck. And if that means calling me, for example, or sending me a message or getting me to do something, I'm happy to do it. But make sure that you reach out, make sure that you unstuck yourself and take decisions where necessary. And if you do that, and if you keep doing that, then that will trickle down as well. You started a company in 2019, you built product for one and a half years, I think, the pandemic happened, you grew 20x, the market changes, a lot of people are calling back to office. Does this feel like a hard stop? Or is it just like that in some industries, or for some companies, it's a hard stop. And for others, they're still like crazy on track to go more hybrid or remote. So how is the current state of growth when we look at your company, because it feels like 20x and everything happens and crazy and then the market changes? And how did you feel? Or how does it feel being especially in the middle of a hype cycle, not only the venture hype cycle, but the remote hype cycle, especially with the name in this case. But then also being the first company that everybody thinks about when market conditions change, and people want to go back to office. And what actually changed at your company during the last year? I mean, in dollar amounts, we're growing faster than ever, but we're definitely not doing 20x anymore. You can only do it for like a year, maybe a little bit more. But you know, the beautiful thing about my company is that we're facilitating global companies, right, distributed companies. And those companies are driven by talent, they want to hire great people. And what drives them to hire great people is what everybody that's fundamentally to growth, right? There's the supply and demand market of talent has always been very imbalanced, where the demand for talent is far greater than the supply. And what we're saying is that, well, you know, through us, there's a whole new avenue of hiring people. You just have to look, you know, further away than the neighborhood. And that dynamic hasn't changed. And so that imbalance still exists. And so great companies are still looking for people and the demand for great people remains as high as ever. And so we see that the market in which we exist continues to expand. And so whereas working from home or working remotely is certainly a thing that had like a really working from home at a really high peak, right? Because we were forced to work from home because of the pandemic. But working remotely in of itself, sure, hit the same peak, but it continues to, you know, go up now. And why is that we all we all realize that much of our work, if not all of our work, we can do remotely. And it's actually really nice if you don't have to commute. And so even outside of remote work, we are lucky to be in a market that is growing quite significantly. But even if you think about, you know, that specific part of it, then, yes, it's still growing no matter what the news says. And there are companies, of course, that are moving back into the office and whatever else. But the individuals know, I could do my work remotely and they seek out those positions. We still see that more than half of people would prefer a remote position over one where they have to go to an office. And there's a big gray area in the middle there. But to us, it doesn't really matter. Like what we want to do is we want to build this great platform to do payroll anywhere to pay anybody any any time. And so that's what we're building. And then if you happen to work from an office or not, we don't really care. We just want to make sure that independently of who you are, you can have access to great jobs. I mean, you raised 500 million in three years that I would say slogan was growth at all costs. And 20xing a company is definitely a part of that. Then it changed to efficient growth, the motto of the industry. So how was the change from from your perspective? You're saying you're still growing as quickly as possible and quicker than ever. When we look at the dollar amounts, of course, not on the 20x amounts, that's that's impossible now. But how was the how was it? Did you have to set the toggle from growth at all costs to efficient growth? Like what changed? Everything changed. We really had to put a stake in the ground to say we were going to run a company differently now. I mean, we can't we can't sustain this. And it is not sustainable for anybody, because growth of all costs essentially means that you're just burning a lot of money month over month. And, you know, we were luckily early enough shortly after we raised 300 million in the last round. We were early enough to say, oh, this is this not going to it's not going to work out for a really long time. We're going to change the way and we're going to limit the way we spend money. And we're going to be really wise about how we're going to spend money. And so there's really hard change. And we did it across everything, right? We became much more diligent about the kind of process we ran in the company, the kind of budgets we set, but also a little bit our attitude about how we grow as a company. And so it was a really hard switch and a bit painful for a bit. But as a founder and as somebody who runs a company, it's very satisfying because it feels like you go from sitting on a rocket to, you know, having two hands on the wheel and one, you know, one foot on the accelerator, one on the on the brake. So you feel in control rather than I'm just along for the ride. And like, let's throw another million to this ad campaign and see how far we go. And that's really good. And it's that's still the way we run the company today. So still, I mean, it's been a little bit over a year, but nonetheless. So what do you say? Would you say from burning a lot of money to burning as little as possible on the on the trajectory? Where are you? We're in a position where we make enough money that we don't really burn anything. Right. And so we can really calmly choose where to allocate money. It's it's really good position to be in because we continue to grow and we have quite significant revenue. So we don't really have to worry about raising another round anymore. That's amazing. Congrats on that for for this point in time. I think there are not many companies who can say that four years after starting while also having this hyper growth in between. So therefore, I think that's that's a good position to be in. What were the biggest or hardest decisions that you had to make while changing from high burn mode to very efficient, profitable? I will I will just call it profitable. How what were the hardest decisions and what were the teams, for example, that you had to restructure the most? I mean, that was it, right? We we we did a layoff where we laid off part of our go to market team in a particular sales team. And the reason for that was really simple, right? If you spend less on building on top of the funnel, you're going to sell less. Right. And there's no point of having an extremely large sales team if you're committed to not doing that number because you're not going to spend a dollar amount to get there. And so, you know, firing people is the worst thing. It's the worst thing and it never gets better. It only gets harder. And so we did, of course. And that was the hardest, easily. It continues to be the worst thing for whatever reason. I hate to do it. You have to do it a lot if you run a company because, you know, the company you have to perform and it doesn't always work out. But yeah, that's super painful. That's super painful. So we did that at the time. And yeah, it was awful. I mean, you're very obsessed with culture and very focused on it. And then firing people definitely hits the culture strongly. So how do you how do you keep everyone and everybody together to still maintain the culture as good as possible while still having to make some cuts and having to make some hard decisions and tough decisions that ensure that the company can survive and become a solid company? Yeah, I mean, what we did is we tried to be really transparent and really open and honest about it. This sucks. We had to do it because X, Y and take ownership for the decision and why we did that. I think that your company, if you've never done if you never fired somebody, for sure. But if you never done a layoff or something, the company might feel very different than it does afterwards. And I don't necessarily believe that you can like meaningfully recover, right? Because the reality is, I think it's probably been better for the company and everybody at the company. The company is just a it's like math, right? Like money goes in, money goes out. And like you have to balance that really carefully. And maybe for some people, it felt like it was this magical place where that isn't the case. And that's never the case with a company. And so sometimes you have to make these hard decisions. And so, yeah, in some way, we did our best to be really, really transparent. And in other ways, for sure, the culture has been different ever since, I would argue for the better, more realistic, because this is what I told everybody as well. It's not that we're evil or that we like wanted to do this. This sucks for everybody involved, most for the people that get fired, but we have to do this for the company. And like with every single person that remained at the company, I was happy to sit with them and tell them, look, the alternative was we all lose our jobs just a little bit while later. So when we run out of money, and so do you want us to be wise now or do you want us to be very terrible until the very last moment? And so I guess that's the way to do it. And I think that's healthy. I think it's healthy for an individual to understand, this is how companies work. This is how decision making is done. And I think, yeah, that's sort of how it worked out. I wish we hadn't done it. But yeah, in some ways, I think it did make us much more resilient as a company. What would you say does it take to be an effective communicator as a CEO? I'm not sure because I'm not sure if I'm an effective communicator. But if I were to argue for it, I would say, one, it's really hard to lie to people consistently. So don't lie. That's a really good one. And be really clear and direct and don't be an ass. I think that's it. And then for things that you care about, you will have to repeat them ad nauseam so many times. It takes so many repetitions of something that you care about to land with people. And it's not because they're not smart or not paying attention. It's because the bigger your company is, the less likely they are to hear it, even though you've made sure that they hear it, or the less likely they are to give it sufficient weight. And so one is just talking a lot and being very communicative, as in just repeating yourself. One thing that I would love to transition into, because I didn't highlight it as specific in the introduction, but you are, as the name of the company applies, a fully remote company. And there are a lot of people who are not, or founders or organizations that are not fans of being 100% remote. So I would love to understand the systems that you have in place. And the operational systems you mentioned with the onboarding process, with we tell everybody where we make decisions, where we write them down and everything, so that people can understand what it takes to build a remote culture. We can then also discuss if remote, hybrid, or office culture, what can be done and what shouldn't be done. But I would love to understand how you structure a fully remote company. So that it can scale and therefore, maybe, what would you say are the most important principles or baselines for having a remote culture? Yeah, I think the first one is, it's important to just demystify the difference between remote and an office, right? Like, there's nothing magical about an office, nor is there about being remote. And certainly, once you reach a certain scale, the differences become much smaller, right? In a company, so we have 1200 employees or so. At our scale, it's like if you were in an office, you were spread over multiple floors or even multiple buildings. And so there's no magical thing in the air that allows people to hear messages from across the whole company anymore, right? And so many of the things that will be true for a larger organization, that it works fully for an office, might be true for a remote organization. I think the most important thing for us and the greatest differentiator is that we have people across many different time zones. And there's no expectation from anybody, except people maybe in support, to work at certain times. And it means that anybody can be on or offline at any given time. And we actively avoid meetings, similar to how Shopify does it. We think about this as well. We don't want to have meetings. It's mostly a waste of time. And then when we do have them, we like to use them to connect with people rather than to discuss things that can be discussed asynchronously, which is the cornerstone of how we think about the remote culture. We work asynchronously. And it just means that it is easy to do work and to get stuff done without being in the same room or online at the same time with somebody else. And to be able to do that, you have to write stuff down and make sure that it is discoverable to the people that might need whatever you wrote down and that you take decisions independently and write them down whenever necessary. And that's it. And that really is it. And so what are the practices? The practices are, we tell everybody, you can work whenever you want, wherever you want. Just make sure that your work is accessible to your colleagues. And so you work very transparently from the get-go. That solves almost everything. That's the beauty. That solves almost everything. And then we just encourage people to not have meetings and look for alternative ways to get the same result. So if you and I, there's something come up. We are working together on a project and we have to make a decision. Instead of this traditional office-based inclination of let's have a meeting about this, where then we have to find a place, find a time, find a room, find people that also might want to join in, et cetera. Why don't we just not do all of that and try to sort it out by sending each other a message, writing something in a document, quickly jumping on a call maybe and then writing down what we decided and then letting the other stakeholders know. I think that is what asynchronous work really is. We work really hard to avoid meetings and we work really hard to avoid having to be at the same time online looking at the same thing. And rather you make your work very accessible so that when you do coordinate directly with people, then you can use for the things where you really, really need it. And I think that really is it. For example, this morning I had one of my favorite kinds of meetings, which is we had a brainstorming session. We're building something really cool, really new. And we all sat at the same time looking at Figma, at prototypes, and we were talking through them, but we were also thinking about how else can we do it? And that was really, really productive. And why is that nice? Because we have many ideas and voices in the room and you can distill it into something that we have some sort of consensus about. But if it's about what color should we make this page, we don't need to have a meeting for that. That's a really simple decision. We can either just one person just makes a decision, or we can iterate quickly on it, or we can have a quick discussion in chat or in some project management software, for example. And so that really is it. And everything we do inside of the company is organized around that principle. So for example, rather we still do an all hands meeting, but I'm actually not a huge fan of it because only one third of the company, one quarter of the company attends it and can attend it. The rest is sleeping or doing other things. And so rather we usually, when I make an announcement, I just record a video of myself and I share it with the whole company in a dedicated channel. And they can watch it at your leisure and then you can watch it again, or you can watch it sped up and you can read the transcript. Or admittedly, what I sometimes do is take the transcript and throw it in an AI and get it to summarize. That is a much more efficient way of working. And it's much more, it demands much less of your time. So much so that like recurring meetings, I think many of our engineers that are not managers, they only have like 30 minutes a week of recurring meetings. So they have one on one with their manager and every other meeting they might have might be an ad hoc meeting, but that's it. I think a lot of people, and I'm calling myself, I'm personally, I only have external meetings because I'm like, I have like two or three freelancers. So therefore it's like very clear what everybody's working on. And we have our process there and everything else regarding the podcast, et cetera, external meetings, which I always differentiate a bit. But even I know the feeling of having too many meetings on the calendar and then not having time to work on the things that I actually want to work at. And then at the end of the day, I'm like, holy crap, I only sat in calls and here and there. And I just haven't had the time to think anything through or to take an hour to check stuff that needs to happen for the podcast or this or prep a podcast. Imagine I'm coming in here totally stressed out of meetings and haven't even thought about a question or an introduction. Yeah, that shouldn't happen. So therefore, and I think that happens more often than people want to admit. And people are fleeing themselves into meetings because it feels or sounds like they have something to do instead of thinking about what are actually like, okay, I have eight hours today that I want to somehow survive. So I do four hours of meetings and then one hour in the cafeteria. Of course, I'm exaggerating a bit, but people don't really think about, okay, what do I prioritize today? What do I actually want to solve? Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think and I recently did a podcast with Amir, who is the founder of Todoist. And he was like, yeah, I as a CEO trying not to have any meetings, of course, as far as possible, as much as possible, but pretty much the same that you said, fully remote culture, trying to do everything asynchronous and then having the time to think problems through if possible. Sometimes as a CEO with 1200 people, that's definitely not possible. But yeah, that's it's just so interesting. Do you think I really like the comparison of like a large company is partly a remote company because you cannot talk to everybody in the office. I really like the comparison. Do you think you hire different people, not from the talent perspective, but from a characteristic perspective that you hire remotely than in the office? I don't think so. Of course, people self-select a little bit. I just think that certain skills are almost useless in a remote environment. Being really visible, that doesn't really help you very much in a remote environment, or at least visibility is measured in a very different way than it is in an office. But for the most part, I don't really think so. I think actually that most things really translate well. I think that if you are a very charismatic leader, that translates just fine in a remote setting. I think because that's one of the things you would imagine, like it's really, you know, this stereotypical super social salesperson, they'll do fine. As long as they're happy working remotely, obviously, that will still translate to their job, right? Like they will still have to be charismatic and doing great sales. And most of that happens in calls. And so I think that that translates just fine. And yeah, no, I don't really think so. Even people that are really skeptical, that have never worked remotely or not significantly so, they tend to be fine with it. Like they tend to be fine. I think the people that really get a large part of their social need out of an office, they might struggle. But I think that's not really an, I think that's just, you know, how you're wired. And you will have to relearn that. You have to find it elsewhere or like find it in a remote setting somehow, which is possible. But of course, harder than when you're in an office and you can go out for lunch with your colleagues. You mentioned that a lot of the work that I'm doing as your employee, I'm documenting. What was the basic tool stack that you started with when you were like 10, 20 people that people used to be able to do asynchronous work? So you just do the tool. You do the work in the same tools you always do it. All right, like the information should be where you expect it to be. So we used GitLab for engineers. So it was in GitLab. I do use Figma for designs. That's where the designs are. There's no magic. So yeah, that's what we used. We used Figma, GitLab, we used Asana for a while. Now we have something else, I think. That's it. There's no, we use Slack very actively. I think Slack is not actually a great asynchronous tool, but I think it's pretty fundamental for Slack or an alternative chat tool. Not necessarily for the conversations. Yes, it's really useful for that, but it's very synchronously. But I think it's a really great broadcasting channel, right? To have like, like we have an important channel. And so important messages that you must read are posted there. And I think that's really, really useful. But that's it. Like, honestly, like there's no, we never really, we tried all sorts of fancy tools and such, but most of them got eaten over the years by Slack. And then we, yeah, Loom, we started to use a few years ago, very actively. And I think I'm one of their biggest users of all time. Like I record a million Looms. So I continue to do that. I love that. I think that's also important to hear that it doesn't like differ so much from day-to-day work. It's just like how you use things more and engage more in them. And I really love the quote that you gave in a different, or answer that you gave in a different podcast that I listened to. You said, when you as a manager or as a founder are looking at somebody and how they sit in their chair and need this to evaluate their productivity or work or anything, then the problem is not the culture. If it's remote or in person, it's way more a you problem. I would love for you to elaborate on that because I think even I might have the same issue in my head that I'm like still not a thousand percent sure how, what we're actually looking for when other people, like how to evaluate work. I think that's still an issue with thousands of people out there or millions who don't know what we're actually looking for. Yeah, I think it's not actually a very hard question if you boil it down to essentials. If you manage a person, you're the manager of a person and somebody works for you, they have a job description. And if they don't, it's about time that you write one. It's really easy. You can do it together with the person doing the job. And then given a job description, you should have a general idea of like, what do you expect this person to do? And I think the angle is wrong if you think of somebody as like a machine that has to produce at a certain rate, but rather do they in general complete what I expect them to do? And so a software engineer, their job is to do software engineering. And if you are a manager of multiple software engineers, you will have a vague idea of what it means to be productive in the specific context in which those people are working. And so you will have a rough idea of what to expect from somebody without looking at how many hours they work, without looking at how active are they, are they online or are they answering my chats immediately? No, because that's not in job description. In the job description, it probably says, write great Ruby software, right? And do that well, deliver features, be able to do code review. And so if somebody is doing that, you can evaluate that on a high level holistically, do they do that and do they do that well? Or do they feel like, oh, I have to, they have to make an improvement in one of these things. And that's all there is to it. It's not hard. It's you have a job description. Does somebody get up to that level? And if you think this through, then it's also really helpful. And we do this inside of remote as well, is that somebody can only be promoted into a higher level to senior. For example, if you understand what it means, what is the difference between a normal software engineer and a senior software engineer? And it's worthwhile going through the effort of writing that down. What do we expect from a senior software engineer that a software engineer doesn't have, right? Maybe it is that they lead architectural decisions consistently, or that they are more productive or whatever else, but you should be able to write that down, right? And then if you have that, then you have like an objective standard and it doesn't have to be super quantifiable, right? But at least you have some sort of standard where you can measure somebody against and say, well, Jane, you're doing really great. But if you want to be senior, assuming you want, this is what I expect. Like, this is the delta. This is what I expect from you. And that's it. And then it doesn't matter what anybody else is doing, when they are doing their work, where they are doing their work. That's all there is. And for some roles, you can actually quantify it super easily, right? Salespeople, how many sales do you do? Support people, maybe. How effective are you at closing your tickets, right? How many do you do? So for some roles, it is incredibly quantifiable. But for when it is not, yeah, don't fall back onto metrics like activity or how many hours somebody makes. Fair enough. That's, I think, good to hear for a lot of people out there. I'm very sure that a few people were like, oh, yeah, that's right. I should have thought about that. What do you think about all the back to office? Not only, I would not call it a hype, but yeah, that a lot of companies like Apple, Tesla, and others are thinking about or forcing their people back to office. What are your thoughts on that? I am not as extreme as people think I would be about having opinions about this. I think that if you make hardware, that will be really hard to do when everybody's from home. So I can totally understand companies that make hardware that ask their people to be in the office, to be close to the hardware and be able to work with it. I can also totally understand that companies that have always worked from an office that hired everybody to work from an office that were forced to work from home for a while then say, look, we're going back to the way we did things because that's how we like to do things at this company. And that might not be in a benefit for those individuals, but that's what they sign up for initially, right? And so I don't necessarily feel super bad for those people. Do I think fundamentally that a lot of the work that is done purely from computers can be done remotely? Yeah, yeah, I absolutely think that. And I probably like a lot of the people sitting in a beautiful spaceship at Apple could totally do their work from home. And should that be like a fundamental human right? I don't know, but I would be inclined to think that at least part of your work, if you can do it from home and there's no particular concern from doing it from home, you should probably be able to do it from home. But those people have the freedom to, especially if you work for a big name like that, they can work for somebody else from home. And so, yeah, I don't run those companies. If I ran those companies, probably would have to make a lot of cultural changes to make sure that people that work remotely can do so effectively, right? Because that's probably the reason why they believe they want to bring people back to the office. And yeah, and if I was Apple, maybe I wouldn't have spent how many billions I did on that giant spaceship. It's pretty beautiful though. It's a cost fallacy. We want to have the people back. Yeah. What are your thoughts on hybrid? Yeah, it's the worst, absolute worst way of working. And the reason for that is really simple. Because not everybody's working remotely or you're not working remotely all the time. Again, like there's no hard definition what hybrid even means, right? Sometime remotely. But because not everybody's working remotely or not all the time, you will not address the problems you will face because inevitably you're going to face problems with working remotely. And so you get the worst possible remote experience. You also get the worst possible office experience because you can't rely on people being in the office, right? If everybody's always in the office, that's easy. You don't have to think about anything else. But if people are sometimes remote, you really can't count on them either. And then given that you expect people to be in the office some of the time or part of the people, you also can benefit from building a global team and hiring in other places. So you get none of the advantages. You get none of the advantages of everybody always being in the office, or at least very few of them. You get none of the advantages of working remotely. And then you end up with emergent problems. Like, for example, rather than finding out ways to do meetings effectively remotely or not have them in the first place, you're going to defer decisions to when you are in the office. And so you become slower and less effective. And then like, this is a minor thing, but if you have a lot of meetings and you know, if you're on upper management, that's always the case. You are going to have meetings where part of the participants are in a room looking at a big screen where part of the remote participants are, and nobody enjoys those. They are really ineffective. I absolutely hate to do those things, whether I'm remote or in person in that meeting room. So yeah, there's like a really long list of reasons why hybrid is the worst way to work. But again, sunk cost fallacy, there's a whole bunch of companies that are, they know that people will leave if they don't allow remote work, but they also have these beautiful offices that they have to use somehow. But they have leases for the next 20 years and therefore can't get out and want to somehow at least fill them up. I think one last thing that I always love to quickly do is an assessment of the current company. More from the perspective, what you think are the biggest challenges that you currently have that you're currently as a CEO trying to solve so that people can understand what happens if I grow my company to 1200 people and have to manage it from there. So what happens at such scale? What happens at such scale? Yeah, I wonder if it's the same for every company. I think for us, we're at the stage where you try to become professional about everything that you're doing. And so when you're a startup, everything is whatever, right? Whatever. Doesn't really matter how you do things. But when you're a big company with many, many millions in revenue, then you have to be very serious about the way you do finance. You have to be very serious about the way you do compensation. You have to be very serious about protecting your IP and these kind of things. And there are infinite challenges like that when you're a big company. When you're a small company, you just focus on building products, right? And then you're selling it. And those are the two concerns. And for the most part, that is what you will want to be doing when you're big as well. But now there are a million more distractors that tell you you have to do all of these things. And as the company grows, because of those distractors, but also just because of the size and amount of interactions, which increases exponentially between people, people will want to create processes and barriers and certain ways of doing things, which is great. And they're useful for certain systems or reasons, but they might also stand in your way to actually deliver a better product faster for your customers. And so it can feel that even though you have twice as many, five times as many, ten times as many people, that you're actually going at half the speed that you did before. And fighting that is really, really hard and really, really complicated. And I think the most important thing is to just ruthlessly prioritize that, because that's the only way that you're going to be able to keep off competition from small startups that are really fast and agile, because they don't have all those people to worry about all those things. And you're in a market where not only startups that are super agile and fast and small are trying to reach the same customers, but also other larger companies. So therefore, of course, there are enough companies out there that want to hire more talent. So it's not that it's the case that it's a winner-takes-all market, which is, I think, quite thankful if you don't have to fight for like ten companies and those are making the margins and everybody else is like, oh, shit. But having every company that is hiring abroad and wants to scale, hire great talent in the market, that makes things, I would say, a bit more fun. Let's put it that way. Joop, it's been a pleasure. And it's very interesting to hear how you scale the company that fast and what happened throughout the years. And I'm super, super interested to see how it turns out in the next years, because it feels like you're only at like phase one or phase two, even when you ran rapidly through the phases, but that you have a lot of things that you want to build. And therefore, maybe we will do an updated session in a year or two, depending on all the things that are happening for you and if you want to come back. But it's been a huge pleasure and I'm super happy to hand over the last words of the podcast to you if you want to give the founders that are listening something on their way as a last word. Thanks. Thanks, Fabian. Thanks for having me. You know, I think building a company is about creating something from nothing through sheer force and will. I would not take any advice from anybody. You just have to do whatever is necessary to make your company work and don't try to be somebody else. Don't try to replicate what anybody else is doing. Just try to make it work and don't give up. That will probably be the reason why your company exists in the first place, because you wanted it. That is the best advice I could give. Thank you so much. I'll link to your LinkedIn, but also remote.com in the show notes, of course. Thanks for being here. Thanks.