The Pomp Podcast - #509 Job van der Voort on Building A High Performance Remote Team

Episode Date: March 10, 2021

Job van der Voort is co-founder and CEO of Remote. He was previously the VP of Product at Gitlab, the largest remote organization in the world. In this conversation, we discuss asynchronous communication, documentation, international payments, Gitlab, off-sites, Remote.com growth, and Bitcoin. ======================= Exodus is an absolute game changer in the crypto wallet space, and we’ve teamed up to offer an exclusive discount for you, as listeners of the podcast. Sign up for Exodus today using my promo code Exodus.com/pomp. This is a no brainer for both newcomers and crypto heavyweights - go sign up today.  ======================= With over 5 Million users, Crypto.com is the easiest place to buy, and sell over 90 cryptocurrencies. They are giving away 4 Teslas! To enter the Lucky Draw, download the Crypto.com App and trade at least $100 of Bitcoin before March 8th. If you’re new to Crypto.com, you’ll also enjoy 0% credit & debit card fees in your first month. Download the Crypto.com App now: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/thepomppodcasttesla. More details about the Tesla Lucky Draw: https://bit.ly/2Z1OsRE ======================= Coinbase Wallets are adding support for .crypto and .zil domains through their partnership with Unstoppable Domains. Unstoppable Domains provides an all-in-one solution for blockchain domains. You can send money using these new domains instead of long Bitcoin wallet addresses, while also storing your domain in Coinbase's collectibles section. Go to unstoppabledomains.com in the dapp browser to register and manage your domains.  =======================

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readable domain. Head on over to unstoppable domains.com today. Go buy your domain. If somebody buys the one you want before you get it, you can't have it. It's like regular domains. Google got www.google.com. No one else can have it. Same thing here. Nobody else can have pomp.crypto because I own it. So go and get your unstoppable domain at unstoppable domains.com and get it before they're out. All right, let's get into this episode with Yobe. I hope you enjoy it. is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Yop here with me. Thank you so much for doing this. Thanks. Thanks for having me, Anthony. Very sure. Let's just jump right into your background. What did you do before Remote.com?

I have a background in neuroscience. So I worked as a neuroscientist for a number of years. And I left that because I discovered Hacker News and I wanted to be part of tech. I started first by starting a startup that went nowhere I ran out of money within three months and I had zero money left so I had to find a job I started working as a programmer somewhere in the Netherlands and there I met Sid who was starting this crazy little startup and he was like yeah maybe you should join me the startup turned out to be GitLab so I joined the team when it was founded and helped grow that to all 500 employees or so for five years I left GitLab specifically to find remote.

So that's a real short story. We got to talk about GitLab real quick, because I think that there's a lot of people who find that story fascinating. What was your biggest learning or takeaway from those five years? I think the single biggest learning was that you can build a highly successful team without ever having an office, without ever seeing your colleagues, or at least maybe once a year. Do it all online.

And not just you can do it. I think the one thing that we've learned was that there are so many advantages to doing that, that, you know, and everybody's learning this today, that this is probably the preferred way of building a business. It's much more efficient and it gives significantly more freedom to individuals. You just have to learn to live without an office. So what is the secret to doing it though, right? We know it's possible. We see some examples. GitLab, I think is the largest remote company in the world. What is the secret to making it a high performance team? That's a good question. I don't think there's one secret.

I do think that there's a few realizations you have to make. One is you get a lot of stuff for free with an office. You walk into the office, you see your colleagues, you see them at the water cooler, all those like micro interactions, even just seeing people at their desk, you get them for free in an office, you completely lose them in a remote setting, but they need to be replaced. And it means that, because what do they do? They help build cohesion within your team. They make sure that people bond with each other and it makes that they have a better rapport with each other. And it makes working together easier and collaboration easier. And, you know, there's more serendipity as people

often say. And so in a remote setting, you get a lot of stuff for free, but that you don't get for free. And what you have to do to solve that is you have to create those moments where people come together. There's not an agenda or not necessarily an agenda. There is maybe something that takes away your focus so that you're not just focused on talking with each other. And it can be playing a game, having just a hangout together or virtual drinks, whatever else, but you need to create those kinds of moments. And you need to do that consistently. You have to do that at different times to accommodate for people's schedules you have to do that um for different interests because not everybody's interested in hanging out in a particular way not everybody's

interested in in games and so that takes significant efforts to be able to achieve that but if you do achieve that that basically solves the biggest problem of remote work which is that yeah the feeling that you lose serendipity and you're feeling that you lose this office sense So it sounds like intentionality becomes a core piece. What about systemization of stuff? I think that's one thing I've heard from a lot of folks. It's just like you've got to build different types of systems, but also a lot more systems because you've got to be more intentional about how the work gets done. Yeah, I think the most fundamental thing is that you have to think about the single source of truth for any piece of information. And in that single source of truth, you have to log everything, every decision, every action, every event.

And so that means that if you are talking about your company culture, for example, there has to be a company handbook. Everybody has to regularly contribute to that and update it. Everybody has to regularly read it and search through it. That's the simplest of things. And that's basically, if you start a remote organization, open a company handbook. But this relates to literally everything you do. If you are working on a project and use some project management tool, then you have to

make sure that if you and I have a discussion about something, about a particular task in there, that we write down, this is what we discussed and this is the conclusion we had. And if you don't do that, what is going to happen is that you're going to create an organization where people have to constantly ping each other and they have to call each other. They have to send each other Slack messages. And this is actually one of those things that you hear very often, right? Like I hate working remotely because I feel like I'm always being attacked by notifications.

And the problem is, is that you have to, you're not writing things down. People can self-serve to the information. And so you have to create a system for this. And the system has to be write everything down, write down decisions, write down actions. It doesn't have to be good. It doesn't have to be long. It doesn't have to be elaborate. It has to be something.

If you write something down that's much better than nothing and that something has to live in the one place where you write things down. So you can also not have like, you know, Google Docs is a great tool, but it's really bad for this because they're hard to parse through and you're going to end up with a million docs and you're going to have to ping people not to ask what is the outcome, but you're going to ask them, well, where is this Google Doc? And so you need to have like a tool like Notion or, you know, if you use project management tool like Asana, where you write down, this is where this information lives and everybody knows

where to find it. That is absolutely fundamental. Without that, your organization is going to feel horrible because you always have to be on calls. Yeah. It's so funny too, because what the intentionality and the systemization really does is it leads to a more efficient organization as well. There's something to be said if you took that same intentionality and brought it to the regular workplace, how much more productive would people be in office as well? So it makes a lot of sense. I want to go through a hypothetical situation, right? You've built a number of remote teams. You run a company that is specifically focused on people running remote teams. And the hypothetical situation is I, today I run a business. It's fully centralized. I want

to run a remote organization. How do I basically remote enable my business? So kind of let's start at the very beginning. I make the decision, okay, I want to become a remote organization. What do I do? What are those first steps or first considerations that I should look at? Yeah, I think exactly what I was just saying. You have to have a place for documentation, even if it's just to write down, like, this is how we work. And many offices don't have that

because you walk into the office, you sit at your desk, that's how you work. If you have a meeting, you go to the meeting room. So you start there. I'm going to create some sort of documentation where everybody can contribute and help expand that. And I'm going to write down,

this is how we work. And how we work starts with, we all work 100% of the time remote. It means that you can be in the office, you can be at home, you can be the other side of the planet, but your behavior should always be the same. And those behaviors are exactly what I was just saying, which is you write down decisions, you write down processes as a new process come up or processes that might exist or may change. and anything that you do has to be remote accessible so even if everybody's still going to the office you know most of the days you have to start running meetings as if a remote participant might join and that means that if you're in an office and you know and you sit in a meeting room you have to have a setup there that makes sure that people can join from the outside or and this

is actually what we end up doing sometimes at GitLab is we were in the same building but everybody set behind their laptops on zoom which feels very weird but it's very useful because it makes that the difference between remote participants and local participants is is near zero everybody has the same exact view that is where you start you start by writing those decisions down and saying this is how we work everything else is essentially secondary depends on like what your preferences are i think you know the most and we see this at remote very frequently because of what we do but the nicest thing is that the moment you start doing that, you realize that there's no necessity to be in the office anymore. And if there's no necessity to be in the office, you know,

the pool of people that I can hire goes from the ones that want to live close to the office or live already close to the office to literally the entire world. And that's, of course, you know, very powerful. So after I decide, okay, I'm going to do documentation, I'm going to be remote first, 100% remote, as you described it, how do I go about evaluating these tools, right? It feels like everyone now sees that there's this remote shift happening and everyone's building tools all over the place. And rather than being attacked by notifications, I'm attacked by all these different product pitches. What are some of the things I should look for in the tools or how should I go about evaluating what actually is going to be effective for me and my organization? Yeah, this space is moving incredibly fast.

So what I'm going to say today is going to be completely outdated in a year from now. So I'm going to be very careful about that. I think there's a big difference in tools made for small teams compared to large teams. And with small teams, I mean, you know, teams smaller than 20 or so people, you will have to make decisions for the entire organization. So if your organization is significantly larger, the amount of tools that you can actually use becomes very, very, very, very slim. First thing, don't go too crazy with tools.

You don't want to have a million tools. Like it just overwhelms people, right? The onboarding experience of joining an organization and being told like, well, these are the 20 tools we use. And then you have to learn what information goes where. That's not a good experience. So that's where I would start. I would start very simple. You need something to do video calls. If your team is big, it has to be Zoom. Nothing else supports large amount of teams, right? At Remote, we have like a hundred something employees. Zoom is the only one that will really work. But if you have a smaller team, there's loads of amazing companies, for example, Whereby

that build really nice video tools. And then it's just a matter of flavor. Like, what do you like? what do you it doesn't really matter it just has to get a point across beyond that i would say as we were discussing earlier there has to be some sort of tool that gives you a sense of presence and the best way to easily reach this is to have an audio only tool so you can use zoom for this but it's actually kind of heavyweight and there's lots of really great tools that you can use specifically for this and the whole purpose of the tool should be i join a room or whatever a channel and i can talk with my colleagues while also doing other work so it feels like easy low threshold to join it doesn't feel like heavy like the people are watching me while i'm doing it and i i can

talk with my colleagues and i can easily leave or switch channels and there's also lots of tools for this tandem is pretty good which connects directly to slack but what we use at remote for example we just use discord which is uh you know used by millions of people around the world and it's actually really really great for this and then you know the documentation piece is really tricky. There's very few tools today that are good, let alone tools that are great at scale. I would say that there's zero tools that are great at scale. At GitLab, we did it fully custom. We used GitLab. We published that as a static website. And that was good because it forced us to build a lot of features into GitLab to make it easier to use that, but it's still not like the ideal

experience i think tools like notion and slides and coda and almanac those are really great tools to do this but they are not yet made for very large teams so at remote today we use notion internally and you know notion had a bunch of downtime recently that is very painful if that's like your most important source of information but also it's like we have so much information there today that you know the search is not very good so that's still very early days my answer to that is like literally just try out what works for you. Like it's very early days. I think none of them are good enough yet to like support larger teams. But if your team is like, you know, below 20 people can basically use all of them, make it all pretty, pretty good. And that's it. And then

beyond that, you probably already have a project management tool. If it's not online or accessible online, I don't know what tool you're using. So probably already good in terms of tools. And, you know, I would say, you know, make a decision in your company about how you're like, what kind have communication is expected so um you have teams that say well we are fully asynchronous so we it's not important to be responsive to messages in slack for example there's many teams that nowadays choose to like not use slack at all and they use something like twist or the new one that was just released quail which looks really nice um but most teams just use slack and it's fine or microsoft teams um and then um that's basically it beyond that it's it's all the tools that you

are already using project management tools, CRM, et cetera. So one of the things I want to talk about is this idea of asynchronous communication versus synchronous. First, just describe kind of the two different camps of thought and then what you see as the pros and cons between the two. Yeah. I mean, I don't think it's one versus the other. I think that's an important start. Right now we are talking synchronously, right? We're in the same time, we're at the same location directly replying to each other, which is very good. And it's the most personal way to communicate And it's great for a quick back and forth. If we were to do this asynchronously, what would happen is you would ask me a question

that would answer it whenever I wanted, which makes the cycle time of having a conversation extremely long. The advantage of asynchronous communication is that if there's no expectation of a direct answer, it means that I can reorganize my own time. So I can have a block of work in the middle of the day of four hours where I say I'm doing deep work and I'm not responding to any incoming things, notifications from Slack and whatever. And then I squeeze in all the little messages, requests, and everything else in a particular block in a day, and I'm going to respond to them there. That is really what asynchronous work is

all about, that you get the freedom to reorganize your own time and respond to things whenever is best for you. And there's two reasons to do this. One is that if you start working remotely, immediately run into, you know, the need to have flexible time. You don't have to be in the office anymore. Might as well just work whenever you want. And the second one is, is that if you do that, that if you have flexible time, you can hire from anywhere and people will be in other time zones and they will be sleeping when you're working, which is, which essentially makes this required. And so that's what asynchronous work allows. It's very important to realize that it's not one is not a replacement for the other you can work asynchronous most of the time

it's still very pleasant to just talk to someone and if you have a quick back and forth or if you really want to collaborate on something yeah you should probably just set up a call or like work together at the same time in like figma on the design um that's essential to work so i wouldn't necessarily like the remotes we do a lot of asynchronous work but we do a lot of synchronous work as well it would be impossible to just actually not i'm saying it uh elmanek this company that makes one of these docs they did an async week uh last week where they only worked asynchronously so there were no slack messages there were no calls whatsoever there were no scheduled meetings and they only work asynchronously and i think one of the things that happens if you

do that one is you feel like you have a lot of time to get worked on it's great but the downside is you feel alone like you're just doing work by yourself and no response to you and that's that's not the most pleasant experience so yeah uh pros and cons of both but asynchronous work is fundamental to making remote work work well i want to talk also about another form of the synchronous communication you alluded to it earlier is this idea of almost uh whether it's a zoom room right where kind of somebody has a perfect uh personal room you can jump in at a certain time and you know they'll be there whether it's some sort of audio communication where everyone's just kind of hanging out the audio's on if you want to talk you can talk if not then

you're just all kind of doing work. What do you find is one, the best way to do it? You mentioned discord for you guys, but are there other specific tools? And then two, like what is the best way to implement something like that? Is it literally just, Hey, everyone's going to get on at 11 o'clock. We're going to stay on for two hours and we'll figure it out. Or is there more kind of intentionality to it around maybe, Hey, for the first 30 minutes, we're going to do something. And then there's an hour and a half of everyone just kind of being connected. If you want to talk, you can like, how do you guys actually run those time blocks where everyone is in a synchronous situation, but it's a little bit more passive than active. Yeah, actually we do multiple things.

And so, and we use different tools for different things. So we have a six times a week bonding time, which is a 30 minute block and it's spread for me, I'm in Europe. So in the early morning for me and in a late day for me, so that in one time I overlap with APAC and the other time I overlap with the US because we have people all over the world and that's a Zoom room. And we tend to have an icebreaker question like you know what's the best food you ever ate or you know something more interesting than that uh and that's then everybody joins the zoom room opt in and you just talk with each other but then what we have we usually have an hangout and so what the hangout is it's always open we use discord for this but there's many tools there's a tandem that i mentioned

early but there's also tools that simulate an office environment so you have like a 2d map and you can walk around it like a branch for example and um those are always on and so our discord audio channel is always on and sometimes people leave messages in slack to say like i am in discord i'm hanging out there but it's always on people just join whatever they feel like throughout the day and people go in and in and out out and uh yeah you just you set it up you create an expectation around the organization and then in the beginning especially if your team is larger you have to seed it a little bit so you have to like especially as leadership hang out there very frequently tell people i'm hanging out here you know come chat with me but over time

people start to pick it up and they you know hang out there and chat with each other um but yeah it's just a matter of like setting up the discord buying this app and just always having it on and it's it's nice it actually creates this idea of like there's some presence which is you know one of the things that you lose with remote work is a sense of presence and this helps them for sure let's talk about offsites. So the whole idea of like bringing people together physically in the same location versus having people be remote all the time. What's the best practices there and how do you guys run those? Yeah, well, since COVID, we haven't done anything, but and before COVID, we were a very small team and we would actually meet up every single month

because we were all in the same country at the same, at the time. So it was very, very easy. um my but the way we we are going to do it post vaccine at remote is very similar to how we did it at gitlab which is once a year once every nine months bring the whole company together at great expense in a nice location in a hotel and for several days uh and it just focuses on bonding and having fun so not getting work done not making plans but just about bonding within the team and then provide budget so that people are encouraged to meet up either locally or even throughout the world. So one thing two of my colleagues at GitLab did is they spent six months traveling the whole world and they went to different colleagues in different countries.

And so we had a policy, which essentially came down to, well, you're going to get X budget if you visit one person. So if you're going to visit like 10 different colleagues, your budget increases um generally i would say we strongly encourage people to get together because it's nice and so at remote we have a policy we will pay for lunch if there's like four colleagues coming together we will always pay for lunch because we want them to do that uh and then the time you spend however you want it it's nice to work together but it's also nice to just hang out yeah and so i guess as part of this um do you think about bringing the entire team together at any one point, or is it actually more advantageous to say, hey, everyone in APAC

or everyone in the US, everyone in Europe, and almost do it like on a team product or like a division standpoint? I guess you've been doing this for so long, like you've probably seen people do everything and try all these different things. What are the pros and cons? Yeah, we tried both. And at GitLab, we kept doing, and we're going to do the same at remote, at least having one, everybody get together a year, which is really hard to pull off because it's not going to be everybody. It's going to be 70, 75% or so. Some people have to fly for 24 hours. If you're deep in India and you're meeting in the middle of the US, it's horrible. You're going to be people that are going to get stuck in border control, which also happens a bunch of

times. But it is something special. The one thing that I... Remote grew really fast over the past year. And sometimes I still have like, is this really real? We have our all hands and I see like a hundred people behind their camera but i'm like is this real and i think the nice thing about like really bringing everybody together is exactly that it's like well you it feels real and it's it's nice to you know have dinner with these people and like see everybody together it's something special and there's something there and i think it's worth spending the the money on um bringing teams locally together or even just like particular regions has certainly similar kind of benefits. But yeah, it's more restricted. It's more, you know, where are you going to make

the cutoff? It's more difficult to do. I think what works really well is if you do it by the sales team gets together, you know, the sales team has an offsite and then yes, people still fly all over the world, but it's a smaller team, which makes it much more manageable. Or for example, a team that works on a particular product. Absolutely. When you think through remote.com go back to you know last year before the pandemic hits you've got this idea what was that original idea and then walk me through kind of what's transpired over the last 12 months or so because as you mentioned you have grown very very quickly. Yeah so I left GitLab specifically to solve the problem we faced there which is every time we would interview someone and then try to

hire someone in a country where we never hired someone before we are faced with how do we pay them? How do we make sure we're compliant? How do we provide them benefits? And it turns out if you hire someone in a different country, you have to comply with local labor laws. And that means you have to run local payroll. And to run local payroll, you have to have a local entity and a local bank account. It's a lot of work. And so there's a bunch of vendors in the world that tried to solve the problem. And they did a terrible job. So terrible that we would lose employees because they said, well, I can't count on receiving my payslip or even my money on time. So remote was founded specifically to solve that problem.

And early on, we thought, well, we're just going to work with a bunch of local partners and that will allow us to do exactly this. What we discovered really quickly was that that is not viable for us. We want to create a really excellent business. We want to be very fast, but we also want to be very cost effective. And the only way for us to really do that is to vertically integrate. And so we founded Remote in early 2019, and we spent, you know, about 14, 16 months just setting up the infrastructure so we could be able to run payroll at the time for different countries only and actually employ people as employer records for other organizations. so it took us a very long time and um april last year we started opening the doors to you know run

payroll provide benefits etc for for uh employers and i think in in may or so we started with the first few employees um and uh yeah we were starting to feel already the pressure because you know in march covid happened across the world suddenly there was a huge boom boom related to remote work we had we were called remote it's it's a pretty good name to have in this time and the demand was overwhelming. For us to be able to open a new country, it takes anywhere between three months to more than a year and significant expense.

It's a very complicated process. So we saw massive demand. We tried to expand to as many countries as possible. And yeah, so we went that year from doing nothing in revenue to doing millions in revenue by the end of the year. Our team scaling, I think from 10 or 15 people early in the year to over 80 by the end of the year.

today i think about 140 internally what's been the craziest part about it all you mentioned earlier like when you saw the wall of all the videos but what's been like the biggest surprise or the thing that just has hit you and been like wow this is working uh yeah i the mission of the company is to just provide opportunities to to people everywhere and it i think it is really cool to see the amount of people that are now able to like get jobs really well paying jobs with really amazing companies. So we see really, really cool companies as our customers that hire people

literally all over the world, often in countries where, you know, I didn't know where they were before until we opened a branch there or, you know, like I had no idea about. And I think one of the nice things is, is that we look at the data and everybody that is employed through us

is really well compensated, like really well compensated. And that's very inspiring because that's what I believe in. I live in the middle of nowhere myself. And I think like, it doesn't really, it should not really matter where you live, where you grow up or where you have to be because of, you know, family reasons, for example, you should still be able to earn like a great wage.

You know, you should be able to have an awesome job and like have a good career. You shouldn't have to move to a particular city. And yeah, we're seeing that that's possible. And that's, that's, that feels, you know, when it was like one or two people, I was like, yeah, you know, it's a fluke, man. These people don't know what they're doing. But now we have hundreds of people employed through us, and that's really, really cool to see. I love it.

When you think about the international hires, payment complexity is one of the biggest nightmares when it comes to all of this. There's a lot of people who think that Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies could be the solution there. You guys, for a number of reasons we'll get into, can't really use some of those currencies or digital currencies as a solution. Talk us through just what are the problems first with the international payment and payroll? and then we can talk about some of the solutions that you've had to build. Yeah, so payroll itself is complicated, but you can figure it out.

But the payments are the real pain. So there's a lot to unpack here. First off, if you are employed locally, you have to be paid in local currency. So if you're employed in an LLC, you get Euro. You know, if you're employed in the United States, you have to be paid in USD. Those are easy.

In many countries, the local currency can be either highly volatile, or it can just be very hard to find anyone that can actually convert a currency for you. That can actually be a problem. On top of that, receiving money is harder than it sounds in many different places. We often have, and often as in like literally every day, problems paying directly into someone's bank account in a particular location. Either people don't have a bank account, which still happens. There's a lot of cash only places or bank account banks are just unreliable or hard to work with, or don't support, you know, modern ways of transacting money. There's an infinite amount of problems. And then for us specifically,

we have to, we tend to have a local bank account. Opening a local bank account is incredibly difficult. It's harder to open a local bank account than it is to set up a local entity. in most cases. I had to fly to multiple countries and post COVID, I have to do all sorts of weird things. I literally have different colored pens on my desk because I have to wet sign so many documents every day. It's the kind of stuff just to open a bank account is crazy. And then once we're there, it still tends to be incredibly hard to just work with them at all. And then we, as a business, we have to think about our customers. We invoice them in whatever currency they want. And then we want to pay out directly in local currency. But we have to account for

currency fluctuations and we have to somehow deal with effects there. That's really challenging as well. And then once you think, well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to hedge, right? I'm going to hedge a little bit on the currency. That's not allowed. You can't do that. You have to have a specific license to be able to hedge a fund. So like, okay, well, what we're going to do is we're going to estimate how much it's going to cost. And then we're going to charge this. Well, now, instead of just like paying someone's salary, you're charging for a product. So you have to charge, you have to pay taxes over that bid that you're like, that's your fake hedge. Like there's no way out. And we face this every single day. And so, you know, we work with a

number of like really large partner banks that have bank accounts all over the world. And it makes it easier, but it does not solve any of these issues, particularly compliance issues. They keep biting us. It's it's a nightmare. I can tell that it's a nightmare just listening to you talk about it. And so the idea is that like cryptocurrencies, it's nearly impossible to use because of all the compliance laws. Right. So there's there's technical solutions, but they don't meet the regulatory solutions in some situations or they aren't regulatory solutions. So therefore, you're basically pushed back into what ends up being likely inferior technology that you have to use to comply, correct? Yeah, yeah, that's basically it.

Yeah, no, for sure it's inferior technologies. It can take days for transactions to complete. Even then, they often bounce. We have all sorts of problems with it. No, cryptocurrency has a huge potential to solve these kind of things, but it's never allowed. We always have to pay in local currency. There's exceptions to this. Like if someone is a contractor, they're willing to accept it or, you know, you could imagine, we haven't done this, but you could totally imagine like setting up something local that then automatically converts into cryptocurrency if everybody, you know, agrees with that.

But it's never allowed for us to directly pay someone in a cryptocurrency if they're legally employed by us. You know, in fact, the local governments are nowhere near, in terms of bureaucracy, in terms of laws, nowhere near thinking about cryptocurrency. They're not even aware of the state that you can hire someone in a different country, right? Like that's in itself already a thing that we have to fight. In the majority of countries in which we operate, we have to explain what we do. And then they say, oh, you mean offshoring? And we said, no, companies just hire great people that just happen to live in your country. and like that's already a pre-covid especially but but still today it's a really big challenge

that we face and so um yeah i yeah it's it's horrible yeah cryptocurrency really like it is a solution like it is a solution it would be great if we could just you know use bitcoin for all of this and it would totally solve everything it would be instant you would have it wherever you want it we don't have to worry about borders but now we are constantly thinking about all sorts of bank accounts we have virtual bank accounts for customers employees and then we have to transact locally it's yeah it's a nightmare when you think about uh kind of zooming out and looking forward five or ten years uh is every company remote are there still companies that are heavily centralized going into offices uh is it kind of a coexistence like the centralized uh in-office

companies have a remote option just where do you think this is all going yeah i think there's a few things i think not everybody wants to work from home right so you're gonna want to have a place out of your home to be able to work from. And I think, you know, there will be plenty of companies that will provide office space. Of course, there's plenty of co-working space and those will continue to do better and better, but there will be many companies

that will continue to have offices or even prefer to have offices. What I do think is that governments and laws are pushing for, you know, like sort of forcing remote work in a lot of ways. We see this in the Netherlands where the law essentially states like, unless there's really good reason

that you cannot do your work remotely any individual should be allowed to do all of their work remotely if they please and that's the direction we're going into especially for like tech companies or companies that have you know valuable talent it's it it's it's not doable to just seek your immediate uh surrounding anymore like you if you want to find a great developer there's thousands right now looking for a remote job but if you happen to live in location x there might be three around you so um we will see a push in law towards allowing remote work but i think in in reality there's going to be many companies that will still have offices but more and more they will go to like flex kind of offices or you know offices where you know a small subset of the

people uh will be there will be notable exceptions i think i think companies that will say well we are we like to work from the office and i think there will be many people that are very loudly will proclaim i will always work from an office um but it's to be expected i think i think it's fine like we will never get an office at remote other than the ones that local governments force us to have of which we have a few um if we were to have a big office i would also enjoy going there like i don't i'm not a person that's like against that i just i just value the freedom that remote work gives me more than being in that kind of office and that's the trend i think it will go i think it makes a ton of sense uh and it feels like to me this is a trend that is not going to

slow down anytime soon uh before we get into the rapid fire questions to uh to wrap it up and then you'll get to ask me one question where should we send people to find you on the internet or find more about remote.com well yeah remote is very easy remote.com and i can't get it wrong uh and me uh you can email me directly it's just job at remote.com or you can find me on twitter which is my first name v o job v o all right before we get the rapid fire how did you get the url there's got to be a good story here no someone else was running business on it so i i said you know i have a good idea i think i could do better what you're doing right now um and i'm lucky that like the owners of them they uh they worked with me and my co-founder marcello and um you know we came to

agreement they're small shareholders in remote today so that's that's how it worked out so i don't like to say that it was expensive i think it's probably an understatement given how well remote is doing i was gonna say they're probably very very happy that they did that deal right They are entrepreneurs themselves and they're doing well, but yeah, I don't think they might. I love it. All right. First question is, what is the most important book that you've ever read? I think it's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Head by Oliver Sacks. It's a really, really fun book. It's not very long. It's like 200 pages. And the reason why I say that book is because that set me off on studying neuroscience, becoming a very deterministic

person in sense of like how I think about the world. And in neuroscience, I think that I got the foundation of the person who I am and how I think about things, which is you have to really know your shit. That's how I think about it. Like if you don't know something, you just shut up and you make sure that you figure out what, and that, yeah. So, and that book basically started all that off. I love that book and I read it through it in like one day and that's the start of that whole journey. That's a great suggestion. Uh, second question is more personal sleep schedule. Uh, I used to not sleep at all. And then, uh, our friends are ready to eat sleep. Uh, got me on this, uh, thermoregulated bed. I basically crank it as cold as possible, sleep like a baby, sleep

eight or nine hours now, and feel like my life's been changed. Uh, what is your sleep schedule and how has that changed over time? Oh, I wanted to eat sleep so bad. I don't think they shipped them to Portugal or the Netherlands. I want it so bad. Um, I'll help you get one. Don't tell money buddy okay good yes thanks um they're gonna kill me for every time i talk to someone in europe like they don't ship here i'm like oh well let's see what we can figure out we'll figure it out yeah no that's awesome yeah i really want one um i have two kids below one of two and one of seven months so easily like i go to i work really hard uh i take care of them and so i sleep when they let me and i wake up whenever they wake up so this morning you know last night i went to bed

at 11 i woke up at 6 30 because my daughter jumped on me so that's it i uh i have two types of people who don't get great sleep either workaholics or people with young kids those are the two uh times when people don't get good sleep so you fit in one category for sure uh last question is about aliens are you a believer or a non-believer no i think there's a good uh chance that there's some life somewhere given the size of the of the of the universe and amount of stars and planets there are i think one interesting thing i think about very often is how how poorly we can actually observe the universe directly from the earth or even through satellites right if you think about if we think about like how many moons jupiter has for example you know

we're like oh there's a lot of them but now and then there's some that we are we're not sure if there's another moon there could be another moon and you're like but the solar system we know that really really well and if you think about like the fact that we know that so poorly and that universe is so incredibly big like yeah i think it's reasonable that there's life somewhere i would and and you know i i'd be curious to see it or meet it whatever whatever it would be yeah i uh i definitely think there's life out there somewhere so we'll see what one question you have for me to uh to finish up yeah i mean you know we think a lot about creating opportunity anywhere and sort of blurring borders right i think borders are you know the bane of my existence

um and i i think the internet helps a lot with that and i think you know tools like like zoom and it's easiest but in the future like vr and ar uh what do you think the future of countries is like will there still be countries in i don't know how many years i think there will definitely be countries i kind of think of that as like that's a manifestation of the physical and analog world, right? People will always argue over who owns what land and where the line is and all that kind of crazy stuff. And then there's a very strong argument for good governance, right? And I think that it's easy for us all to latch onto the bad governance of governments and say, look at these idiots. They're just wasting money and making our lives harder. But they do provide

a lot of good benefits as well in cases, right? Everything from national defense all the way on down. And so I think that it's not a thing of like, will they ever disappear? It's more so like, what will they look like? And I think the part that I'm most excited about is competition in the open market. So if people can now live wherever they want, governments will compete for those citizens. And you see that, you know, inside the United States, you see cities and states doing it kind of on a more micro level. But on the macro level, you're going to see countries do it. And so if all of a sudden you can choose between, you know, Estonia, Singapore, or Portugal, the United States, I don't know, Argentina, or Nigeria, where are you going to go?

Like there's a couple of core things that people care about. And so I think that having that competition is a good thing. It'll ultimately breed kind of much stronger nation states and much more attractive environments for the citizens that choose to work within those nation states. But I think that that's probably one of the most exciting yet most misunderstood things about the future? Like, what does it look like? I have no clue. It just feels like free market competition is good for everyone, right? Yeah, that's what I hope the direction we're going into. You know, I have, as an EU citizen, I have a lot of freedoms within the EU and even outside of the EU. But I have friends, you know, from Ukraine, for example, they're severely limited in where they can travel.

And even if they travel, it's a pain, even to like very otherwise, you know, very open countries. and my hope is that you know borders dissipate with with this competition and i'm curious to see if everybody's going to live in portugal where the weather is always good or whether you know it will actually be more uh evenly distributed you are portugal's number one salesman i love it all right yo listen thank you so much for doing this uh i really really enjoyed it i think that uh what you guys are building is obviously a no-brainer uh and the remote trend is not going to slow down anytime soon. So if anyone out there is thinking about moving to a remote organization or running one, I heavily suggest go check out remote.com.

They pretty much have everything you need in order to run your organization, do payroll, pay people, et cetera, and do it all in a compliant way. So I appreciate the time. We'll have to do this again in the future. Thanks, Anthony.