a16z Podcast - Pay Without Borders with Deel, GitLab, and Safetywing

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

The predecessor to the office was Florence’s Uffizi Gallery – an admin building to the Medici mercantile empire. That was in… 1560. In the centuries to come, work was revolutionized, with perhaps the most well-known inflection of Ford Motors adopting the 40-hour work week in 1926. The cubicle? We have Robert Propst to thank for that, entering the picture in 1968. It wasn’t until the 80s when the Internet appeared on the scene and wifi released in 1997, forever changing the way people live and work. Since then, companies have continued to adopt many of the practices from the 20th century, despite the possibilities being fundamentally different.COVID sent a shock into that system, forcing many people to adopt a distributed model and despite much debate about what the future holds, this episode will highlight the many ways that companies are continuing to adapt.Will companies shift toward more asynchronous work? How will a distributed model shift the way we hire? How will companies attract top talent, and is remote the only benefit that matters? What workers and companies will come out on top of this sea change?And of course… is the office dead? We’ll address these questions, and much more!Topics covered:00:00 - History of remote work3:27 - Is the office dead?7:05 - Async vs sync16:18 - Building culture remotely27:15 - Attracting top talent31:16 - The evolution of benefits36:04 - Remote work vs work39:29 - Location-based pay46:36 - Open salaries51:23 - Vetting top talent55:32 - The need to adapt58:39 - Rewriting the rules1:03:09 - Infrastructure gapsResources: GitLab’s Remote Handbook: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/Deel’s Salary Insights Tool: https://www.deel.com/salary-insightsDeel’s State of Global Hiring report: https://www.deel.com/state-of-global-hiring-2022Deel:Deel’s website: https://www.deel.com/Deel on Twitter: https://twitter.com/deelAlex on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BouazizalexSafetyWingSafetyWing’s website: https://safetywing.com/SafetyWing on Twitter: https://twitter.com/safetywingSondre on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SRaschGitLab: GitLab’s website: https://about.gitlab.com/GitLab on Twitter: https://twitter.com/gitlabDarren on Twitter: https://twitter.com/darrenmurph Stay Updated: Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

So a lot of top talent are entering the remote market, and they're specifically looking for organizations that not only offer or allow remote work, but empower people through remote work, as in they do remote work really well. So the bar has continued to rise for organizations which are remote. It's no longer good enough to just be remote. Today we're talking pay without borders, and we're doing it with three individuals. Darren Murph from GitLab, Alex Boo, These from Deal and Sondre Rash from Safety Wing. Before we dive into the meat of this episode,

I wanted to give a little bit of history. So we're all familiar with the 21st century of the office, but the offices actually existed for hundreds of years. Seriously, in 1560, we saw the predecessor to the office, which was Florence's Uphizzi Gallery. And in the centuries to come, we saw work reinvented many times over with perhaps the most well-known iteration of that, the 40-hour workweek, by Ford Motors in 1926. And then came to you. the cubicle that was in 1968, we all have Robert Probst to thank for that. But it wasn't until the 80s when we saw the internet appear on the scene and Wi-Fi released in 1997, forever changing the way that people work and live. And since then, many companies continue to adopt the practices

from the 20th century, despite the possibilities being fundamentally different. I mean, just think about it. We have internet. We have phones the size of our pockets. We have 3D printing. I mean, the technology that exists between 1926, when the 40-hour work week was invented to today is just fundamentally different. And of course, COVID sent a shock into that system, forcing many people to adopt a distributed model. And despite still very much debate about what the future holds, this episode will highlight the many ways that companies are being forced to continue adapting. We'll cover all types of topics, like how distributed work completely reshapes the way that we work and we hire, things like how you can still attract top talent, and whether

remote is the only benefit that matters. We'll also talk about what types of workers, what types of companies come out on top of the sea change and what missing infrastructure is needed in this new environment. And of course, we'll tackle a question, is the office dead? So we'll address all of these questions and much more. So with that said, I'm excited to present Pay Without Borders. The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures.

Why don't we start off with a couple quick intros? Why don't you each give your name, the company you work for? And of course, where you're calling in from, because we are recording this remotely. So, Darren, why don't we start with you? Yeah, thanks. I'm Darren Murph. I'm the head of remote at GitLab, calling in from North Carolina, USA. Wonderful. Alex, let's pivot to you. Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm Alex Boiseez. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Deal, and I'm calling you from Paris. Amazing. And Sondre, let's, as they say, popcorn to you. Great to be here, Steph. My name is Sondre. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Safety Wing, and I'm calling in from San Francisco, the old town.

Yeah, the old guard. and still got some people there. No, I hear that it's bouncing back. But let's jump into this idea that is circling the internet. It's maybe a silly question to start out with. And I hope that we go a little deeper than this. But I do want to ask from the three of you, is the office dead? I think the office mentality is dead, or at least on its last leg.

And the difference there is when you talk about mentality, it's about the lifestyle that you had to live, the persona that you had to carry in order to fit in and enable yourself to have a career, that's gone, especially in the knowledge working space. Distributed work has enabled companies to focus on results and create atmospheres where people can do their best work from wherever they are. So it leads to two new realities. One is that the actual physical office really has a new lease on life. I'm actually really excited to see what people do now that you don't have to use physical real estate the same way that you once had to use it.

There's some interesting things that you could do with that from experiential spaces to bringing people together. But the other is that enables companies to attract and retain talent from all over the world and build a culture that's focused on results. And so you're going to get just an amazing tapestry of people that want to come work. for companies all over the world when you remove the physical office from the equation. I'm sure we'll touch on this, but we're at the earliest stages of realizing that this is all about how work happens and much less about where people are. And that's really, I think, is what's at the heart of that question. Yeah, that's basically confirmed. You know, safe towing. We have a location in San Francisco for, you know, gatherings. We have gatherings around the world

with her whole company or individual teams. And so that's what in-person mean in the future is what do you do when you gather. But in terms of like, is the office dad, like what is killing the office? I think that the economic reality is what is like really killing the office. It's that, you know, should you choose to work in an office if you're a startup thing can work remotely? I think that, you know, the difference between starting a company in some, you know, Midwestern small town and the kind of labor market that you have available there versus

New York City. There's as big a difference from New York City to hiring on the internet. So the ability to hire the best in the world, that is the kind of economic thing that I think will ensure that the companies that are remote will outcompete those who aren't because they will essentially hire the best in the world versus the best in their town. And similarly from the employee side, you know, you could apply to the best companies in the world instead of just the best in your town. So you have a very biased opinion. I've never worked in a business in my life. So I don't know what you mean even by when you say the office is dead. My perspective is, you know, there's different work environment and people have things that are more convenient for them.

And companies are going to, whether it's on the founder, whether it's on the type of people that they have, have different setups that work best for them. You know, in our case, for example, we've got 1,300 plus people and no offices. We work in 80 plus countries, right? Internally, you know, we found a good balance with having people on WeWork membership, which they can do whatever they want, whenever they want. a good balance. That's what fits us really well. So the definition of the office is kind of fuzzy for me. Is it a place that you're sitting from 9 to 5 of an assigned desk? That's maybe that in in a lot of the industries that we're in. My definition of an office, given that I've never worked in that environment, is just the ability to meet people and to just have my laptop and sit wherever I want to work. Yeah. I love that you mentioned that because I worked in an office

for one year and I've since worked remotely for many more than that. And so I have this perception of how could you not work remotely? But similarly, people who have worked their whole life in an office for like three, four, five decades and now have been forced to work remote, that reality also seems just as far-fetched. And so I do think it matters, like, when you entered the remote workforce, did you do it during COVID as well? But I think what I'm hearing from all three of you is this idea that the office, quote unquote, that we imagine from the last hundred years since, you know, the 40-hour work week was invented, that is being disrupted. That That doesn't mean physical space won't play a part in our future,

but it also means that we have the opportunity to reinvent both the physical space and this digital office space that we all operate in. And that's something I'm really interested to hear from each of you on this idea that we can rethink the way people work. So it's not just digital, physical. And one example of this that I'm seeing a lot more of is this idea of asynchronous versus synchronous work. So when you are in an office, you are kind of forced to work quite synchronously. right? Everyone comes in at nine, everyone leaves around five, and then you have to use that

overlap effectively. But when people are distributed with the technologies that we have today, you can actually work at nine and then have someone else work at one and someone else in the Philippines working on the complete opposite time zone. And I want to hear from you, Darren, on this subject, because you are the head of remote at a pretty large organization, but you also, I think, work quite asynchronously. Can you talk specifically to the way? way that your organization thinks about asynchronicity, and specifically, I'd be interested for you to speak to your meeting policy. Yeah, sure. So for context, for those listening, GitLab has over 1,600 people. We're a public company, and we have people in over 60 countries all over the world.

And you mentioned sync versus async. We try to look at it as sync complementing async. There are two tools in a toolbox. Sometimes you need the synchronous tools. Sometimes you need the asynchronous tool. But we've been very intentional about weaving asynchronous workflows into the culture at GitLab. And to create massive tailwinds around this, to really galvanize people, to learn to do things very differently, maybe even counter to what has got them to a certain point in their career, the best way to do that is to integrate it into your values and operating principles. It's non-optional. If you look at the GitLab values page, you'll find an operating principle of bias toward asynchronous communication. And we actually bundle that within our diversity

inclusion and belonging value, not our results or efficiency value. And the core reason for that is if you are thoughtful and deliberate enough to move a piece of work forward without commandeering 30 or 50 minutes of someone's day, you are fundamentally being more respectful of their time. And so for us, async is about the work for sure, but it's also about showing respect to other people. Now, what do you need to do something like this? It's quite difficult to stand it up, and I think that's why you're seeing a lot of organizations who have, quote, gone remote, essentially copy and paste the office environment into the virtual environment and not really take advantage of what's possible when you are globally distributed.

The core reason that I have found is that most management philosophies prioritize the speed of knowledge transfer, as in how fast can person A, tap person B on the shoulder and transfer something from one brain to the other. But to do this well, your management has to optimize for the speed of knowledge retrieval. How fast can person A and person B seek and find information on parallel tracks without needing each other to be online, or wake, or fully brought up to speed? And this really gets at the heart of building infrastructure, building systems that optimize for that. And it's a completely different way of thinking

from the co-located norms of getting people together such that knowledge is always in physical proximity to each other. When you're working across the globe, you can't assume that someone's available, that they're online, that they're in the same time zone, that they're not on PTO.

So now we're seeing companies scramble to build systems, knowledge management systems, so that that information isn't just in someone's head. That's how you scale knowledge in a global space. You did ask a bit about meetings. So at GitLab, all meetings are optional, and we're very intentional about what a synchronous meeting has to have

before it can even be accepted on a calendar. All work meetings have to have an agenda, no agenda, no attenda. This is, again, being respectful of someone's time so that even if they can't make the synchronous meeting, there's an agenda there from the start. They can input their questions. They can input, a loom, for example. They actually can contribute to the meeting without physically being there.

And also, this is how we scale information. Even after that meeting happens, the agenda is still there. We can go back, we can reference it, we can see what decisions were made. If there's anything crucial that the entire organization needs to know, we can document that in the handbook. And that's how we enable meetings to be optional. We also document what good meetings look like and what things shouldn't necessarily be a meeting.

organizations ask me all the time, how do we reduce meetings? My friends at Levels Health have this concept of memos over meetings, which I really like instead of the term asynchronous, which feels very big and weighty and nerdy at times. But things like FYIs, status updates, and recurring meetings are the low-hanging fruit. So if you're listening to this and you're like, where do I start? Status updates, FYIs, recurring meetings, those are usually the first that can go. Yeah, and GitLab has a handbook that covers a lot of this information. And I think it's eating its own dog food in the sense that it is focusing on documentation so that anyone, no matter where they are at what time, even years from now, can go back and leverage the information or the knowledge from GitLab, having been a remote company for several years. But I want to hear from Alex and Sondre, hearing this, this idea that actually you can work completely asynchronous is not something that many people are used to.

when I had a friend from GitLab share this idea that meetings could be completely optional. That was kind of like a reality shaker for me. I was like, can that work? I dare you, Darren, to come work async on payroll and compliance and visas and things like that. You know, I think every industry have different things. There's work that can be done async.

There's work that can be done async. There's different stage at a company when you're very early. I don't think async work is the right way to go. I think you need to build, you need to build fast. You need to get things done. But as a company scale, right, the way GitLab has done, right? And also, I think it's very anchored to GitLab as a product, right?

Being able to write async. It's very core to your product. So this is a bit that you can achieve and you can't, right? And I think it's important to be realistic on that and setting the right expectations, right? Whether it's for founders or companies later on, what are the right stages for you to really be async, what parts of the business can truly be async. Because if you set the expectation for the whole company to be there, you know, my guys on the customer support side or on the operational side, they're not going to live the same life

that you're going to be, right? So it's important to set the right. and to have the right mix of things at the company, and as much work that can be async, why not, right? Like, there's different people living in different time zones, right? So that's super important. But as a whole company, it's a bit more complicated. I am actually on that side.

Normally, I'm the only one who's not pro-Async in these conversations, but I built my previous company fully async, meaning like zero meetings. So often when you have the async conversation, I will agree with, you know, you want to minimize meeting, we want to do documentation. I agree with 90% of what Byrne is saying. And we've chosen the path of not full,

and safe doing for the reason Alex said it slows you down on a particular project it can be at least I can see how you can overcome that and also the kind of weaker relationship and instead you know we end up this situation where we do bracket meetings constrain them 8 to 11 a m pst is when you know meetings can be booked Monday Wednesday Thursday so it doesn't kind of slide out into your whole week and then I think you get the best of both worlds like you get that necessary time for coordination and fast project moving while at the same time giving people time to work and complete their tasks. Yeah, I think there's not necessarily, as Alex said, a correct answer of sync versus async. I do think there's a big spectrum in the ways that people operate. Like I can share one example for me is I first

worked remotely at a quote unquote remote first company who had been remote from the ground up and they tended to be more async. And then when I joined companies that previously had offices, I was a little jarred by how synchronous things were. And so again, it's not, so much that it has to be fully async or fully sync, but I think one interesting note is this idea, again, of being able to reshape this digital office and having it not be copy and pasted from the original office. Another thing that commonly comes up when people speak about remote work and maybe it's downfalls or pitfalls is culture, right? And culture is something that notoriously is hard to build even synchronously within an office and it becomes that much more

difficult asynchronously or online. And something that I've noticed as well is this idea of copy and pasting. So one very, very simple example is what people do when they want to run a happy hour. They say, everyone, go buy some alcohol, and then we'll sit in these squares on Zoom and we'll bond, right? It's like very little bonding happens in that way. And so I want to hear from each of you how you've seen culture in particular be facilitated remotely, because this is one of the things that I hear the most from people who are trying to make the pivot from the office to online is that they're really seeing that that culture is lacking. So, Sandra, why don't we start with you as you built up your company? How have you been able to facilitate that? Well, I mean, the basics of,

I think, a great culture is the same remote, which is your vision and values. Are they worthwhile and, you know, are they conducive to joy and productivity? And then it's like, how do you reinforce that? and ensure that the norms and the way people treat each other in the company is in a way that you want to work. So a lot of it does kind of translate. I think what you have to do in addition is you do need more norms of written communication because more stuff is done in writing. So you need a culture of written communication, not just a culture of verbal communication. I also think you need to build a more broader lattice like a framework. So we're a small company, but we're 180. people from 70 different countries. We're really in many places. And so they are in all kinds

of different locations. When you build a company in a city, you can sort of build on top of the cultural lattice in that city. You kind of don't have to say those things that are shared cultural norms. When you are global, you have to build that foundation for everyone. So I do think that culture becomes more important. You have to emphasize the kind of full shared cultural lattice that people can then opt into and get onboarded onto. So from the start, we took it incredibly seriously and I've been able to build a great flourishing culture, and that's also the feedback from the people who work here.

So I do think it is completely possible and necessary. Just to quickly double click on that, when you say that you are outlining your culture or being really discreet about it, like what does that look like? Because what I'm imagining is a culture page living on a website that says, we care about empathy and we care about seriousness or productivity, hard work, just all these

terms that are kind of amorphous. And honestly, like, every company cares about productivity. Every company cares about empathy in theory, right? But there is a hierarchy, I think, within every company, but then I also wonder how stating those on a page, and I'm not saying this is what you're articulating, but that's often what people imagine, right? That stating them on a page does not actually disseminate within an organization. And so how did you actually go about these kind of high-level ideas of what your culture should be and actually implementing them and making sure that they're phased into the organization? These things that I'm about to say are not remote-specific again, but one is you've got to believe in your values, and you have to be a great

example of them, and then you have to hire for them, and then you have to reward them in how you promote and build people in your organization. You have to kind of retrate them and make choices based on them. You know, it's kind of like, you know, when people talk about, oh, no, this is a soft value. What they mean is it doesn't matter. So then your values aren't being disseminated. But if people can see, like in Safe 2ing, we might, for example, say, oh, yeah, no, we ended the relationship with this vendor because we were not able to kind of lift them up

with what we want to do on the value of authenticity because they were just giving us this, like, bullshit marketing language or something like that. But, you know, when people can see that, that this is not just a vague aspiration, but it's actually a hard constraint. It's something that we're willing to take costs to achieve. Then it becomes enforced and it's something to emulate. And then it becomes, you know, also something people can rely on because then they understand, oh, yeah, indeed, this is the culture.

The written explicit, discrete statements about the culture in the company matches what I see in the behavior of the founders and the choices that are made in the company. And then it's going to be permeated. Awesome. Darren, I want to hear from you. How did you go about that same process of building culture within your company? I think it starts with defining what culture is at your particular organization, because everyone will join your organization with a different interpretation of what culture is. Past experience, their own personal beliefs. So step one is actually defining what culture it is. Of course, at GitLab, this is documented. It's really

composed of three things. One is values and operating principles, which Sondre already emphasized. The second is building camaraderie. You have to formalize ways to encourage informal communication. And then third is how you work, defining how work happens. And this goes back to the sync and async conversation. Customer service, for example, works far less async than other organizations. And so you have to understand what are the ebbs and flow. between the organization hedge against that friction that's going to find its way in if you don't, but defining how we work plays a big part in culture. And I think a lot of companies don't pay enough attention to how work gets done and how communication happens. That is critical to culture.

So being very intentional about that is a massively important third leg. I do want to say two things on that. I mentioned operating principles within values. This is how we create behaviors out of those words on a wall that you mentioned. If you look at the GitLab values page, it doesn't stop with the six core values. There are literal behaviors that you can practice. Short toes is one of those. And one of the examples is you have permission to give feedback or input on anyone else's function or domain, and they should collaborate with you with short toes, as in, you know, you can't step on anyone's toes. That's very operational. You'll know, you'll know if someone is receptive to input or feedback from another function, then you're doing it right. If not,

you're doing it wrong. So that's how you can operationalize the values. You mentioned the Zoom Happy Hour. I do want to give one example that leaders can implement tomorrow on this. So I came up with this idea called a community impact outing. So if you're going to invite 1,300 people to a Zoom happy hour, as a management team, that's 1,300 sunk hours. You're never going to get that time back. That's already happening, right? So if you're committed to, to that, here's a better way to do that. You give people an hour of their week. It doesn't have to be on a Friday. I mean, time is relative, an hour of their week to go do something meaningful to them. Maybe it's volunteer at a food bank. Maybe it's reading at a local library. The only thing you

ask them is to wear company swag and take a selfie while they're there. So they spend that hour doing something uniquely meaningful to them in the community that matters to them. And then they share all of this content back in a public channel and instantly you build authentic bonds. For example, I'm an adoptive father. I might choose to spend my hour working at an orphanage or in the adoption field. When I share that back, if someone else on the team is considering adopting or they were adopted, immediately we have a connection. Now there's instant community built. This is real, genuine, authentic relationship in the workplace that you probably won't get out of a Zoom happy hour. So same hour spent much higher impact, and this is something that would

be very difficult to pull off in a co-located space. So for leaders who are becoming remote or they've been forced remote, these are some of the opportunities that you can lean into to do things differently and build culture in a new way. I like that you shared that. I just wanted to note that there is this just immense opportunity to rethink how you build culture. And some examples of this are, I think Hotjar was a company that just gave their employees a stipend that said, actually, we don't think that you're going to build culture in these digital Zoom happy hours. We actually want you to go and hang out with your coworkers to co-work with them. And so I think it was like $1,000 or $2,000 a year and they could actually go and fly to wherever their coworkers lived

and spend time with them. Or, you know, if they lived close, that could go towards a dinner or to things that you could do in real life. You know, many other companies rely on quarterly off-sites. And then this idea of copying and pasting, I think, is really important because it's the natural tendency to just replicate what you know. But what I want to see more companies do is instead of Zoom happy hours, like throw your team in like Fortnite or something. Throw your team into something digitally native where they can have fun.

And that's where you bond, right? Where I've seen people bond in these, again, quote-unquote, happy hours is when they're doing a game or you hear of these like digital escape rooms, but throw them in something where they can do something together, because that's where camaraderie is born, right? It's not born by, like, forcing people to awkwardly talk together. A couple of examples that I think can be helpful that we do. We have on Monday, the first 20 minutes,

people get distributed into random groups of three, and then we give a prompt, and we've thought about these prompts. So that's like our one kind of cohesiveness thing. It actually receives really high scores. It sounds like a waste of time, but it's really a good one. And then we also have these like value talks on Monday where someone gives a five-minute take on one of the values themselves.

That's another one that, you know, we've had a lot of success. I think you're a customer of our product, Darren, right? Connections. We acquired a company called Roots. And they have a plugin that plugs into Slack where they invite people, two people from the company, the same company at the same time

so that they can get. So that one, I mean, we're obviously big fans, right? Because we use it and we acquired the company because how great the team was. that one has helped quite a bit. Alex, can you just explain a little bit more about what that tool does? Yeah, it's super simple.

Actually, are you guys customers? Yeah, PTO by Roots, yeah. Okay, you use PTO. So Roots has another plugin where basically, whenever you're on a Slack, right, you've got like 100 people to 100 people. Every week, you can define the cadence, but every week they just take two people from the team

and match them together, like, the whole company. And they just kind of like push you towards, like having a conversation and meeting with people across departments, just very helpful, and people at the company really love it, and they create meaning full bonds, and they understand each other better for that. Nice. I think if you're able to build good culture, that naturally will incentivize people to want to stay. But I think another big question within this idea of distributed work is how do you actually incentivize people to join your company in this much more competitive

landscape? And so naturally, every company out there has a big question of how do I attract top talent. And I want to hear specifically from Darren first. If you saw a shift when COVID happened and when many, many more companies went remote, if you saw a shift in your ability to attract top talent. And I asked this because I know for quite some time there was almost like a bundle of companies. And it was not that big that was fully remote, sizable. And it had a unique position in the market because there weren't very many jobs out there that were fully remote, remote first. paid well, et cetera. And I think for a period of time, several years before COVID, those companies actually could attract top talent quite easily because they had this one benefit. You know,

I've heard some people say the one benefit that matters is remote work. Things have clearly shifted, right? The supply of remote jobs has gone through the roof, as has the demand, but I think the supply has shot up more. So I want to hear from you, Darren. Have you seen a shift in your ability to hire really top talent remotely, has the marketplace become more competitive? Interestingly, it's yes and yes. So the market has become more competitive for the reason you just mentioned.

All of a sudden, there are far more options for people to work fully remote. It used to be a very small pool of employers. Now it's much larger. But what has also happened is that people who were absolutely committed to co-located, or maybe didn't even consider remote work a feasible pathway for their career, are suddenly considering it a feasible pathway for their career.

So they are going out and seeking employers that are fully remote. And interestingly, were fully remote before COVID, before it was cool. Because they've had a taste of what freedom and flexibility and truly getting to design your life without sacrificing your career. They've had a taste of that. And especially for employers that are forcing teams to return to an office,

that becomes the trigger for them to say, okay, I've proven to myself that I can work remotely, even under very suboptimal conditions. Now I'm alert to this potential that my career won't necessarily be squashed or thwarted if I work remotely.

There was a bit of a negative connotation with it before, not so much anymore. So a lot of top talent are entering the remote market, and they're specifically looking for organizations that not only offer or allow remote work, but empower people through remote work, as in they do remote work really well. So the bar has continued to rise for organizations which are remote.

It's no longer good enough to just be remote. You have to be intentional about investing in teams and leaders and tooling to build the infrastructure to make it an awesome experience. I mean, Sondre mentioned this, even though there's certain elements of the company that they love having synchronous moments. The backbone of that is a rigor around documentation.

The backbone of that is the infrastructure is there so that even if you are in a different time zone than the founding team, you can still function there and function well and enjoy more flexibility than you could in the past. So it's yes and yes. There's more people now, looking for great remote jobs and remote companies are now held to a higher standard because

just having remote is no longer good enough. Yeah, as we talked about before, there's a huge spectrum in how people operate remotely. I mean, I'm sure you've all heard of companies that are tracking their employees and making sure that they're productive within certain hours and measuring them in those ways instead of measuring them through their outputs or their impact within a company. But I also want to hear from you, Sandra, as a company that provides health care or insurance, which you could say is a benefit, right, that many companies offer, do you have a take on the changing landscape of benefits? And that just being one aspect of what talent is looking for. And just to set this question up a little further, in the past,

you had companies like the Fang companies, being able to attract top talent because they gave huge packages, but they also gave all these wild benefits within their offices. And some people may still be looking for those precise benefits, but I wonder if you're seeing a shift in the types of things that talent is looking for in order to join one company over another. And I also would love to hear just how you're seeing safety wing play into that as well. Yeah. So what's happening there is that you both have the kind of Fang-like modern benefits being built, but you also have the basics being built. So when we ask people who, you know, send up for our health insurance, what they had before, the most common answer is still nothing, right?

And for contractors, it's almost all of them. You know, this has been incredibly difficult to buy before the basics of benefits like health insurance and retirement is still not really available. It's very difficult. So you have, of course, options, you know, you can use services like deal that does make it much easier to buy. But for a large part of the internet labor force, just building out the basic infrastructure is still where we're at.

a lot of the Silicon Valley benefits have kind of come their way into the remote workforce, you know, unlimited holidays, you know, minimum holidays. We do have that at Safe to Wing and, you know, various other fun ones like personal development budget or buy your own plans or indeed like you said earlier, expense trips to colleagues, expense virtual meals, etc. But it is the kind of basics like can you work remotely, holiday, you know, health insurance. Those are the things that people really care about and become motivated to a apply somewhere in order to do. What we want to do at safety wing is to kind of build out one part of that infrastructure. We started with the health insurance. We're continuing with retirement,

disability, so that you can offer the same basic benefit suite as a remote global company. And continue onwards till the future we see, which is something like a global social safety net, where in the end these services will be bundled, not unlike the way they are bundled in countries today and that you will have a membership in one. And indeed, we think that we're saying in our vision statement, we're building the first global social safety net for the first country on the internet. Alex Steel has this unique insight or oversight into how different companies are hiring, whether they're hiring part-time roles, contract roles or full-time. How are you seeing this landscape shifting? Are companies offering different types of benefits? Are companies rethinking their

need to bring on certain types of talent. What are you seeing in that market? Yeah, I guess for context, at Deal, we help companies hire around the world. We basically build the whole infrastructure for them to be able to do so without having any. So as you said, they can hire people as independent contractors. We've got over 90 plus entities around the world. So you can hire people as FTEs and give them, you know, benefits as if they were locally hired. Or now we actually even help you manage your own entities, right? So starting to build a full stack of HR for global teams. I mean, you know, this different perspective. I think right now we're very biased simple. So we serve about 10,000 customers from small customers to large companies,

publicly traded companies. And I think overall in the tech world, you know, like Sunred said, right, it's the same type of benefits that are trying to be given out across the board. When it comes down to contractors or employment, you know, our employment infrastructure is pretty new in this space. Contractor was kind of the default model because, you know, EOR space, right. Employer of record space just wasn't as built out. So it was either I hire people as contractors or I open a country and entity and go really hard in that country. So now that things have shifted, there's different perspective to the conversation. There's of course the benefit aspects, but there's mainly the compliance aspect of how am I operating in the

country. So every company have different types of models on how they do that. I think the more companies were interested in the employer record model recently because it is brand new and the ability to hire people as employees. And again, there's technicality. as it's easier to get a mortgage, right, if you're employed versus being a contractor, right? So there's lots of those different technicalities to it. What we're seeing now is kind of a healthy mix of both. And when it comes down to benefits in general, people have a tendency to try to give more or less the same thing and be fair across the board.

That's kind of what we've seen. I think the interesting part. And by the way, that's something you guys are discussing. And we'd even love to hear your thoughts on that there. And for me, remote work is not remote work. It's just work, right? And I'm hoping the term remote work and it disappears over time, right? It's more about how you're doing work and how people are structured and the output that they have.

And I think the key thing that we're seeing is people, because they're starting to look out, right, from their 30 miles radius, right? They're starting to hire globally. And hiring globally, right, means that you're starting to have more consideration, right, for what is standard in one country compared to another from a benefit standpoint. But at the same time, right, as you scale, you want to be as standardized as possible, right? So that brings a lot of interesting and complex challenges, which we're having fun solving. But, yeah, I mean, overall, the world is a big place and there's amazing talent everywhere. And I think more and more people are realizing that it's about working with the right people. It doesn't really matter where they are as long as you've got the right talent.

And I mean, I'm not saying anything new here, but that's really the trend we're saying, right? From like the small companies all the way to, I mean, we onboarded a Formula One team yesterday as a customer, right? So, like, you've got a very big breath of products and people. Yeah, I will agree that long term, the word remote goes away and it's just work. What we're talking about is the workplace. We're still going to use the term remote for a while because we've done it the other way for so long that it's a necessary qualifier in the language of work. But my son is three right now.

It's highly unlikely that he'll ever see work any other way. I'll have to show him YouTube videos of millions of people getting in a personal vehicle. and driving to somewhere they don't live to open a computer that they carried with them and it's going to blow his mind it's going to require an explanation

it's going to be one of those generational things where you can show a pencil and a small circle in a cassette do you know what this is oh yeah I used to rewind cassette tapes using that this is the workplace cassette moment or fax machine moment and it's very much a massive shift

that shouldn't be underestimated Yes, I remember talking to a friend recently and I was like, I wonder when they're going to stop teaching kids handwriting in schools, which sounds crazy given our generation because that's so foundational to, or at least my education growing up. And I don't know if that'll disappear anytime soon because it is also a cultural signifier or it's almost like a step to learning to read, which then leads to comprehension. So it's all interrelated, but I do wonder what things we're used to, really. foundational things in our society, which of those will be relics? And it actually reminds me also of something I saw recently, which was the tweet covered a newspaper article from 1891, where someone was slamming the office because that person felt like we should all be hunters and gatherers and outside and in the wild. And so I wonder, you know, if we're seeing certain permutations of that today where what we think of as work, say 200 years ago was not the office, and then 100 years ago it was the office, and then today it's something else. But to both of your points, that is work.

Remote work is just a modifier that we've added in this current juncture when there's a debate about what work should be. At its core, it's leveraging technology. Remote work is a product. So humankind invented the internet. We're finally using it and leveraging it in a way that helps people live better lives and leaders build more durable organizations. So it's been a long time coming. Yeah. And I think we're seeing this technology research. shape the competition that we're seeing in the market. We've already alluded to this, but I want to hear your take, Alex, in particular, on what you're seeing in terms of pay, right? Because as this market has so many different participants from many different countries, there is a question that has come

up, which is location-based pay, right? Do you pay someone based on where they live, or do you set a standard rate based on what your company is willing to pay? And there's arguments on both sides of the aisle, But I want to hear from you specifically on what you're seeing, what are companies doing currently, not what people want people to do, but what are the actions truly being taken within these companies? Are companies falling towards the side of we're going to set a rate and that's going to be the rate for our employees or are companies adjusting based on location? Yeah, and that's an interesting question in general. We actually released the Saturday Insights tool based on our data set hundreds of thousands of people hired. So if you've gone deal, when you create a contract or even outside of that, We can see based on the role, the seniority, and the location, what on average people are paying for a specific person and specific role.

Obviously, what we've seen over the last few months, and I think that's also tied to how much venture capital money was available as well, right? So we've seen a lot of people around the world, very talented people get hired and just generally the pay, right, increase quite a bit and got some hard data data. I think you mentioned that at the very beginning, right, we released the global report on the data trends that we're seeing from a pay scale perspective and from a hiring country perspective. But I think that makes a lot of sense, right? Some very talented people are starting to work for larger companies and whether it's the best practice of the company or their work, different people have different perspective on how to tackle it. Internally, a deal is generally we pay based on country rates.

I think we pay usually the top of market but still within the market. I think one of the reason why a lot of companies have hired around the world, right, is because local talent tends to become very expensive, right? If you want to hire an engineer in the Bay Area, I mean, a lot of the businesses I love and know don't actually make sense. When you run the numbers, if you're a software engineer level two costs you 500 care year, right? So, you know, going global is just redistributing wealth and redistributing opportunities has definitely balanced out this a little bit where very skilled people tend to get paid hired.

But at the same time, you're not paying those people the same that you'd be paying in San Francisco. I do think some companies are trying to do that. I'm not really sold on the long-term aspect of this. Again, I think businesses need to be profitable. to pay people fairly. And I just think the area salaries are just out of control and that everything will come back, hopefully, to an equilibrium there.

But in general, obviously, as large American, well-funded company have entered market, it's a great way to get people to live their company. You know, companies they live locally is to pay them a lot more than what they would get paid there. So, yeah, the trend is obviously right now, you know, there's some form of authorization happening. So we've seen some people being like good,

but there's still a ton of money on the table that have been raised over the last few months. right. So we still continue to take that track of the data. Got it. And I want to hear from both Darren and Sondre because you operate companies at scale with many employees distributed all across the world, across dozens of countries. So Sandra, why don't we start with you? How do you think about that within your organization? So we have opted for flat and the argument for it would go something like this. Remote has made the world into a global labor market and most people just haven't realized that yet. So when we hire an extremely talented Bosnian genius software engineer, at the moment we hire

them, they may be like partly in their local labor market. But by the time they have safety under LinkedIn and they know about working remotely as a software engineer and they're very good, they're in the remote labor market and they can apply to other jobs. So then I would say like suddenly they're underpaid because it is a different labor market. You know, the labor market is what are the participating employers and employees in a particular market? And they are, of course, affected because they also have the local employers, right, that are competing at their salaries, but the global ones is where it's at. So I would say that's the direction. So we chose to skip to the end of the market equilibrium immediately and we have a flat salary. There's also some fairness. And I can understand, you know, there is pros and cons like the fairness argument, favor of local pays living conditions. But, you know, with the people who work in safety doing, they're so mobile. So they move around the world. And it seems a bit like kind of subsidizing a lifestyle choice. If someone choose to move to San Francisco, yes, indeed, the salaries are off the hook there. The living costs are also off the hook here, just like you wouldn't subsidize someone moving

to an expensive neighborhood if they can. Maybe we won't see the same about subsidizing moving to an expensive city. I think that fundamentally it's the value of the contribution that will determine the market equilibrium over time, and so that's the choice we made. So if you're choosing this flat approach, how are you setting that? Is that based on where your HQ is? And if it is, if it's not an SF, are you finding that it's tough to hire some of the talent

that is at those upper echelons? That kind of depends on what talent we're looking for, right? So in our case, we are within the SF band, yes. But we're not on the top of the SF band. You know, we're not competing with Walmart, highest paid engineers. They have to pay more. But we are in that range, yes. And, you know, I think that seems to be aware.

it's going right now. I kind of like Alex, a bit baffled by that. I saw some data from Carter last month, which saw that U.S. jurisdictions were actually converging on San Francisco salaries in their data set, which is, of course, just a national U.S. dataset. It's possible that is what will happen for the top talent in knowledge work. Because even if you live in some tiny town with 5,000 people, if you are like an amazing machine learning engineer, you can still have a great job at Google, right? And maybe it is the most productive companies like them that will compete for you. So that might be what will happen that we will converge on the top talent, on the Bay Area salaries. Well, it's mainly because people move and they don't know their managers or people

move and their managers are too scared to say, you're now not in San Francisco, you're in a place that costs half the price. Having the conversation of like, for fairness, I, need you to re-equilibrate is very complicated as well, right? So I think that happens quite a bit too. I love that you brought that up because there is almost like a gamification of whatever system you're in, right, where people are debating both the company and the individual are debating how much information to share, right? Should we share exactly how we're calculating how people are paid or should we tuck that behind the belt? Should I tell my employer that I'm living actually in an outskirt of SF so it's not as expensive or should I tell them I'm living in a

SF. Or should I tell them I'm planning I'm moving to a much cheaper location that information sharing is being adjusted because there is this very complex calculus that I think every company is going through now, at least the companies that are choosing to be distributed. And Darren, I think you're the perfect person to speak to this because GitLab, at least for a period of time, had an open calculator, right, where it actually showed exactly how people at GitLab were paid. Of course, names removed. You don't know who's making this money. you could actually say, hey, I'm a product designer of this tier living in this place, and it would spit out a number. It was fascinating because it was open not just to employees,

but the public. So I remember looking at a job a while ago, being like, oh, maybe I should work at GitLab. And I plugged in my information. And I was like, okay, I know what I'm going to make if I work here. And I think GitLab maybe pulled that back a little bit. It might be public to your internal employees, but it's certainly not public to the outside world. But how did you think about that or how did the company think about sharing that information and how or why has that thinking maybe been adjusted? Yeah, so because GitLab is so rigorous about documentation, you can Google and find old blogs about how we call it the compensation calculator came to exist. And the calculator that you mentioned stuff, it is still there. It is behind an employee

firewall now. So everyone that works at GitLab has access to it. If you're a recruit, you're a candidate, you'll have access to it as well. In becoming a public company, were certain things that were connected to that, that just made more sense to have it there, but we still believe in the ethos of it. Look, situational leadership applies here. The answer is it depends on the company. It depends on your industry. It depends on if you're already profitable or not. It depends on so many market factors. And it will probably change in a quarter or a year. We are at the earliest stages of a massive globalization. shift. So pay attention. The one thing that I advise to leaders is to pay close attention to how

expensive it is to rehire or regain top talent. There was this push early in the pandemic to think about cutting salaries if people moved from a high cost of market region to a lower cost of market region. But the truth is there are some ancillary cost with that, rehiring, retraining, institutional knowledge that has lost, all of that ends up factoring into it. I think those are good points, and it isn't as simple as just location-based or not. But I do think that it's fascinating what you mentioned, Sondre, about what you're seeing about things actually moving to that upper echelon, because I think many people would expect the opposite to happen, because as you make everything distributed, you do get access to talent

elsewhere. And I'm sure many people have heard the trope of, you know, you can get equal talent for a third of the price. may be a trope, may not be a trope. I've certainly heard of examples where that is true. And on that note, Alex, I think it'd be interesting to hear from you about your global hiring report. How are we seeing different regions of the world shift based on their ability to be hired places or to hire from other places? Are there certain regions that we're seeing grow or shrink or how are those dynamics playing out at the larger level? Yeah, in general, it depends on the roles, right? And generally, what I look at the most is engineering, because that's where talent is the most scarce.

And we're definitely seeing quite a rise in salaries and in location. I'm saying that too much, to be honest. I think people are going to start really looking at the country. But Brazil, for example, has been an amazing place for talent from an engineering standpoint. And salaries have definitely got up there. And you've got other amazing place like India, Colombia, right? Those are great places. And a lot of people are hiring there.

And in general, there's also different trends we're seeing around people going into more remote friendly cities, right? That's also another thing that's quite interesting from a movement perspective. But overall, you know, the way you need to think, and the way I think about it is you're seeing definitely large hubs being created from top companies having been built in the market, right? So if you look at Brazilian, you've got New Bank, right, amazing and I'm nice, super great talent. They've built out the infrastructure. Same thing happened in India. Same thing happened in Uruguay, right, with the local, and those talents are starting to spin out and realize, okay, I've learned a lot. I've worked in very successful companies in tech. I can now

work for a global company that's going to increase my pay because I'm not locally competing anymore and have the same standard and the same approach and the same mindset and culture, right? That's very important, right? The same culture that a lot of the global employers really have, right? So generally, we're just seeing that all over the world, the top talent, like you said, Sondra, get to work for the best companies. That's what we're here for, right? That's what we're enable. And it's been really interesting seeing some very obvious winners, which are just very tied to one strong rigor and strong engineering or strong educational ecosystem, right? Like Eastern Europe or Latin America and others. Another thing that that reminded me of is in the

effort to find top talent, companies also seem to be shifting their approach to vetting top talent. So something that I've noticed in the industry is a move from not necessarily getting rid of interviews, but also inserting a lot more assessment in the process of vetting top talent. And in addition to that, I've also seen some companies bring on someone as a contractor first because that infrastructure exists before they actually hire them full time as more of like a vetting period. Have any of you seen elements of that within your companies or otherwise in terms of how people are actually shifting their approach in, again, not just attracting top talent, but vetting that talent? We like to say that no one accidentally ends up at GitLab. You very

much self-select into it. And for us, it starts with documenting our strategy, our vision, so that there aren't any secrets. The worst possible outcome is you join a company and then six months in, you think, huh, their thought on flexibility isn't exactly compatible with mine. At the root of unhappiness is this misalignment between expectations and reality. And so in hiring, whatever you can do to create a clear view of what reality looks like at your company, the better. So two great ways to do this. One is to pull up the values and operating principles page at some point during the interview and ask people, what resonates? What do you love about this? What don't you love about this? And you want to get clear early on if it's going to be compatible. You want to make

sure that there's as much values in operating principle alignment as possible. And I've also spoken with some leaders at smaller organizations, some of whom are transitioning to remote. So part of their remit is going to be being a part of a massive company-wide change management program. And I've advised them to implement the boring solution, which is add a line item in the job description that says you are excited and enthused about being a part of building a new and innovative culture. And you want to bring that up. If someone shows up and they say, no, I want to work in a place that's fully baked, then this probably isn't going to work for you. And especially for transitioning orgs, write it into the job description. You want to

people that will be galvanized that come in as tailwinds, not apathetic or headwinds. And it's really critical if you're transitioning to make sure that you bring people on that want to be a part of that change. When it comes to the technicalities themselves, right, you as contractors, employees. I mean, this is something we deal with quite a bit. It depends on the infrastructure that people want to use, right? It depends on also the total cost of the person, right? Employing in France is much more expensive than employing in the U.S., for example.

So I think most companies, much HR leaders, most CFOs, which we work with pretty closely, have different approach that they built in terms of, like, how do they scale their workforce in the country? So it's less in the case that we see. They don't really use, I mean, sure, I've seen some companies do a couple tests and pay you as a contractor before in order, before they bring you on as a full time. But full time in the remote work, doesn't mean a full time employee per se might mean different in types of infrastructure, which we support. And to their end's point, one of the thing that's been really fun at deal is now that we're starting to get larger. we've been working with Fortune 500 in terms of helping them understand what does the future of work kind of looks like, right? Like it's becoming very obvious that, you know, my sister was a couple years younger

does not approach work the same way I did. And, you know, I don't approach forward the same way my parents did, right? And it's very important for them to have the flexibility of understanding how do people work today, how do they set up from a compliance infrastructure, what do you need to do right in order to give the right flexibility of people to make sure that you can attract the top talent, right? And that's very, very much top of mind. And we're seeing much more organization and being more mindful of that because the cost for them is not as large, right? It's just understanding to some extent what does work structure balance into those people and how to best facilitate

that. And I mean, it does come down to what you mentioned earlier. So that has been quite a bit of fun. It's my new role, right? Working with those bigger companies and help them understand how to best play out the next couple years when it comes down to like how to roll out your organization. What are some of the gaps that let's just take like someone who works in the Fortune 500 who's been doing that for the last 30 years and who has a very concrete vision of what work has been in the past? Alex, what are some of those gaps in terms of maybe things that they might not know, things they might not understand, maybe things that they should be thinking about, like how many days of the year can my employees, my full-time employees from a specific country

be in another country? Are there things that you're kind of uncovering as you go through these conversations that you think maybe more of these leaders should be thinking about? I mean, there's tons, right? Like a very basic example is my employee wants to live in five different countries over the next year. There's much more complex cases than that. But that's a very basic one. We're saying that a ton, right? A lot of people want to be digital nomads.

I think safety wing started as an insurance for digital nomads as well, right? So the team was quite a while ago, and, you know, that's just super complex cases, right? Tell you a Fortune 500, CHRO, I'm going to leave three months there, four months there, three months there. You're going to give that him a headache, right? And there's so many of those cases. Like that one is the most obvious ones, but there's so many of those cases where those organizations, one, don't even have the tools to support this type of infrastructure. But a lot of the times they don't even comprehend it, right?

Like they expect you to come to the office from 9 to 5. What you're going past that is sometimes very complex to even process for them. So it's a culture shift that, one, I believe, is going to be necessary, right, because of the workforce of tomorrow, but it's also even a tool shift, right? And this is why you've got companies like ours, right, or some various company. I can definitely confirm that, you know, we have, for the Nomad product, they have, you know, 100,000 customers. And they cluster, like actually Alex mentioned from his survey. You can see they're kind of like choosing cities and countries, a bit like people choose products. So that's a secondary effect of remote work that is emerging.

is one of the interesting things about our time. And you definitely see a lot of them struggling if they work in a Fortune 500 with frustrated HR departments trying to figure out how to square this new reality with rules and systems that are often obsolete to deal with it. It's so true that some of the rules and systems are either obsolete or outdated. I mean, there's terms like overtime, which just don't really apply in many scenarios as it relates to remote work or to speak to some of, the things you were mentioning, Alex, I worked for a large enterprise company prior to this,

and they were figuring that out. And they had a policy where you could, I think, spend 90 days outside of your country or your base that you're being paid out of. But they also had a restricted list. And I'm Canadian, and Canada was on the restricted list. And it was so fascinating to me because I was like, wait, I'm Canadian and I can't go back to Canada and work there. They're like, no, because you're an American employee. And I think they ended up opening offices in Canada. But there's just so many intersecting regulations and so many people and companies and governments trying to catch up to what we're working with here and figure out, I like that you said, square the circle, Sondre, like how do you actually figure some of this out? Because some of the rules are just not written yet. So, Alex, how are some of these leaders?

How are they getting this information? Is it just about Googling the right things? Is it about talking to people like you who have the information from many other companies? what does someone do if they're in that position? There's a couple of things. Most C-levels are heads-off, but companies usually have their own networks of people that they usually ask to, right,

between sharing policies or, you know, some people will do the work and then share it with others, right? So we've seen quite a bit of things. I think every company is adopting different types of policies quite close to a few people that used to be at GitLab, so I know they playbook pretty well in terms of like contractors, employees,

or then, you know, opening your own entities. So I think each company kind of different. find their own things and then share it. There's no real source of truth for that, which we're trying to define to some extent. So it's a couple of players in the industry. They're trying to define the best practice on how to do this right. And I think the complexity is where navigating international lows at scale, right?

And they very much differ from a country to another. Sometimes they differ from a state to another. And there is no right answer yet. It's just a matter of building the right content and working. We're at a stage where we're starting to work with governments in terms of establishing those rules as well, which is quite interesting, right? So instead of working in a gray area of, hey, my worker is moving from a country to another, I want to hire them in that country, but I don't have the right infrastructure, right?

I think we're getting to a critical point where a lot of governments, not all yet, but a lot of governments are realizing that, one, there's an opportunity, right? There's a ton of governments that are being super helpful so that more people see them as an attractive country, right? And there's a couple of things playing in their hands, right? Like Brexit, I don't know if everyone would agree with that, but from a talent standpoint, right, Like, there is a lot of amazing people that left the UK, and they had to find the next best place for themselves. And a lot of countries, friends being one of them, they've got other things that are not really good. But, you know, they have an amazing tax incentivation.

I think that's what you said, to make you come back to the country, to make you move to the country. And lots of countries are being very forward about this. You know, recently we did a pretty large partnership with the UAE as they kind of looked at the market and said, hey, we want the best talent to come and we're going to make it easy for them to come, right? where we're now able to process visas in like five, seven days, we're very talented people. And I think that part is super, super interesting, right? And as governments are becoming more forthcoming on this and they really want to help, I think companies are going to get more comfortable with

the models. And that's why I love my job, right? Like, we're exactly at the right place on that front where there was no rules years ago. There was no tools two years ago. They were a couple. But they were not to the standard that you and I are expecting. And now we're getting to build out the infrastructure.

that's very much needed, right? And similarly, on the health insurance place, is the Wild West there. It's very hard to build a global team and give, like, a great health insurance there. And across the whole stack, there's so many amazing companies to be built. I'd have to underline that.

You know, also being on that same frontier that I like this, it's how fluid and willing the countries are these days to do things is actually amazing. You know, we didn't invent it, but we've been this, like, promoter of the Nomad Visa thing, which the first country implemented it, in 2020, Barbados, now 50 countries have implemented it. A member of our team spoke at the floor of the United Nations about it, like three months ago,

and multiple countries have reached out for us to help them set it up. So because, like Alex said, they're looking to get the upside of this new world. Like they want to attract the digital nomads. They want to attract remote workers. They want to track their remote companies, and they see this as a great opportunity. So that dynamic has really kicked into gear where people, they want to succeed in the new world. and they're so much more fast-moving than I thought possible just a few years ago. Yeah, well, competition will do that to you, right?

Now that they realize that they are competing for talent to a degree, I liked the analogy that one of you gave, which is that these countries or these states or nations, they effectively need to orient as products, right? Like, how do we reduce the friction for people to interact with us? How do we make our documentation really seamless? The same way we talked about documentation for a company, right? Like, how do people know what they can or can't do with us?

us because if that's not clear, they're just going to go to the next state and work with them, right? And again, that's both on the individual level of moving to those places, but also the company level. Like, can we hire in your jurisdiction? Can our employees spend part of their time there? And so I think it's a fascinating question to ask. And we're obviously going to see a lot of new infrastructure come to be in the next couple years. And so I want to kind of end off on this idea of infrastructure, right? Because we are in this new paradigm. We're seeing the sea shift of many people asking good questions about what is to come because not all of it is defined, right? And we're not here to predict the future, but I'm curious to hear from each one of you, if there are

gaps, like very clear gaps that you see in the current market, whether it's the ability to hire, whether it's the ability to move or live in places as an employee that need to be solved or should be solved in the next couple years in order to really elevate this distributed workforce. And just to give like a very simple example, if we think about like second, third order effects, something that we've seen happen as more people start to work remotely and less office infrastructure required, we see like a big shift happening from office space to residential space. And so that's like one industry where if people are interested, there's opportunity there. So are there other areas that you see almost like being surfaced from this sea change

where you think, ah, okay, we need a company there. We need a founder to think about that. question. What infrastructure is missing? I'm a bit wild light on these topics, but, you know, city building is definitely opened up. I've seen resorts being remit into remote work resorts. I've seen hotels being remit into this like co-work, co-living situations across Asia that's happening now at a big space. There are several cities being founded. You know, there's a couple of castles in Europe being remit into towns. There's a city being attempted started outside of Texas. This hasn't happened for 100 years. I think this is a fascinating development

because I really want to see what kind of new cities people will build. It's been so long since the kind of last big population redistribution. So that's one. Number two, I would say legal, law, you know, credit scores. It's like really basics of being able to enter into contracts. You know, imagine, you know, let's say you sign a contractor agreement

with some today and you don't use any of our service-like deals or you buy something on the internet. It will say this is arbitrated. in what Delaware, not exactly sure what it says on the contract, but you're a company from Hong Kong and your customer or contractor is in Argentina, you know, it's not going to work. So you need, I think, we can build legal arbitration for things like labor contracts and other things. So that's an area where I would love to see someone begin, as well as, you know, credit scores to unlock the ability for, you know, nomads of people who work on the internet,

to get loans and mortgages that haven't been made yet. You know, the entire internet economy is still built and kind of trustless basis, but you can unlock massive, massive new categories on the internet once you solve the trust-giving infrastructure that's beneath it. So that's my third request. I'm actually been working on exactly for a couple months now, so I'm very excited about it. I mean, it's a very simple idea, right?

Like, banks don't understand you because you're not an employee that's working 9 to 5 at a company in France. They don't understand you. And that's why, you know, I've seen so many people use are you want to work as independent contractors because it's a better setup for them but being forced into an employer of record model or local employee model because banks are just not going to look at them if they don't have the right like credit score or the right infrastructure. So I actually love this idea and I've been talking with it quite a bit. I'm very biased because

sadly I'm very focused on like compliance and all of those things. Right. So there's so many things that need to be built there from equity globally. Like we're trying to do parts here, but it's such an interesting topic where most people don't truly understand and that's kind of like the next layer, right? Like you enable companies to hire, but then now they want to understand global equity sharing and how they actually do that. And I think there's a user market there that's quite for the taking for a car or a new type of company to kind of go for. But in my perspective, it's, I forgot the term in the US, but it's like the rush to gold, right? Oh, like build shovels. Exactly. Right. So like there's so many things that can build in this space. And even though it feels

like there's a couple of companies, maybe even like the other building up that stack. There's so many smaller things, even at a country level that can be built, right? If you look at there's a company called rebase, right, that just help, like build a simple tool for you to set up in Portugal. Like, those are amazing companies that need to be built. And I'm excited to see how many, especially as more people are starting to be much more entrepreneurial and willing to build smaller products and like, you know, the whole bootstrap environment and Wave in general is going to enable a lot of great entrepreneurs to build hammers in the space that's all of one problem. I mean, really well, and there's so many of those that, yeah, it's very exciting.

All right, I'll give you two companies and a product. So the first is a company that employs life designers, life agents. So think of a travel agent, but for life. So in the past, you might say, I have a week of vacation. I should call a travel agent and ask, where should I go? But now, if you can live and work anywhere in the world, that's kind of daunting for a lot of people. What if you've never designed your life? What if you've just let an HR department tell you what city you're going to live in and they significantly constrain your options. So there's not a lot to think about. This is incredibly debilitating and perplexing for a lot of people. And so I think there's an opportunity there for someone to come in and ask people a lot of questions to really get

a beat on what fulfills them, what makes up their purpose portfolio, and then give them a slimmed down set of options on where they could go to have the most impact in a community to be the most fulfilled and help them think about things they might not be thinking about now that their career and physical location are more decoupled. So that's one. The second one is a riff on something I heard on my first million, which is Oceans 11 teamwork, but for knowledge workers. So in Oceans 11, there's a heist that needs to happen. And so there's a lot of backdoor conversations on getting exactly the right team together for exactly the right project. Well, now that knowledge workers can work anywhere in the world, I see an opportunity for six or seven people to only ever want to go in

with the same six or seven people to be the absolute best at very specific projects. I think that's very interesting. There's some interesting arbitrage that could happen there. All right, so that's two companies. The product, decision making. I'm of the belief that we have some massive challenges ahead of us as a society. I'm an adoptive dad to the orphan crisis is front and center for me. And I see tens of millions of people going remote, and I think, well, they could use that recaptured commute time to make a big dent in the orphan crisis, people who may have been called to foster or adopt, but it's too hard, their schedule's too rigid, so they just opt out of it entirely.

Well, now all of a sudden, these people are back in that market. There are probably a lot of other crises that I'm less familiar with. Well, what's at the heart of stopping people from doing this, especially in organizations? It's the speed at which they're able to make really informed. decisions. And as companies get more distributed, unless you're very intentional about that decision-making framework and infrastructure, this can become really complicated, really difficult. It slows things down. There's less rapport. So I think there's something interesting in this decision-making framework that helps people really leverage a distributed network of people

to move faster with smaller iterations through two-way doors. It's going to be a different management philosophy. But if we can make smaller decisions, faster decisions, and with deeper conviction, I think we can solve a lot of these problems that our society as a whole are challenged with. Yeah, I just want to highlight something that relates to something we talked about earlier, which is the meeting philosophy that GitLab has, which only works if you have a clear decision maker, right? You can't have these asynchronous meetings where everyone gives their feedback, but then you have to do a decision by committee. So the only way that works is having these clear decision makers who at the end of the day are required to take feedback, but are not

required to incorporate it in the final decision. So I just thought that was like an interesting way to think about that being foundational to that way of working even being possible. And I loved hearing all three of you talk through different opportunities because even as you were talking through things that needed to be implemented or things that were missing in this infrastructure, the wheels were just spinning. There's so many interesting things from like fractionalized real estate to like land use policy. And I think the final thing I wanted to say is I'm very excited about how our dependence on companies changes. And what I mean by that is, I think it relates to something you're working on at safety wings, Andre, which is in the past, especially in the United States, your ability to get health care or something that you spoke to, Alex, is your ability to even get, like, a loan or a line of credit is based on your job, right?

Your employment relationship. And that, I think, naturally will change as top talent does become more independent and does have many relationships. relationships with many employers and many other people like your example, Darren. So I think that's maybe an interesting thing for people to consider. It's just how does that relationship change? How do people just have a new type of model with work? Before we end things off, is there any closing thoughts on the future of work that any one of you wanted to share? I learned a lot. I thought this was awesome. And I would encourage leaders who are leaning into the future of work to pay attention to folks on this call. And people are being awesome.

about building in public. There's no defined playbook. We're building this in real time. So leverage that. Look at this as an opportunity instead of through the lens of scarcity and fear. This is an exciting time to be alive and building teams. Yeah, add on to that, remote work for me is just work. So if you want to be a top performing organization over the next few years, if you want to make sure companies like ours don't take your best talent, you've got to be able to have the right infrastructure to be flexible. If not, we'll be there and we'll take good care of your employees. All right. Well, on that note, we can close things off.

If you don't keep up with the very, very quickly evolving space of work, not necessarily remote work or distributed work, some company out there will probably eat your lunch. So thank you, Darren, Alex, and Sondre for taking the time today. We will include where people can find you in the show notes, and we will include all types of resources like the GitLab Handbook, the Deal Global Hiring Report. Thank you guys. This was very fun and informative. Thanks all.

Thanks for having us. Thanks, everyone. Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, or tell a friend. We also recently launched on YouTube at YouTube.com slash A16Z underscore video, where you'll find exclusive video content. We'll see you next time. Thank you.