The Pomp Podcast - #612 Paying Remote Employees in Bitcoin

Episode Date: July 23, 2021

Marcelo Lebre is the CTO and co-founder of Remote. Marcelo previously worked as the VP of Engineering at Unbabel, has held several CTO positions and is a startup advisor.  In this conversation, we discuss the remote working trend, compensation structures, legalities and compliance of paying international employees, democratization and decentralization of wealth, stablecoins, and bitcoin.  ======================= Did you know nearly 338 million dollars worth of NFTs were sent last year? And in 2021 that number is growing faster than ever. Looking to make your first NFT? Check out NEAR’s fast, scalable, low-cost, open-source platform. Learn why NEAR is the infrastructure for innovation at near.org  ======================= Matrixport, Asia’s fastest growing digital asset platform with $10 billion in assets under management and custody, it offers one-stop crypto financial solutions including fixed income, DeFi in 1-click, structured products, Cactus Custody™, spot OTC as well as lending. You can earn from high single digit with fixed income to high double digit yield with their Dual Currency Product. If you hold crypto and look for yield, this is the app you don’t wanna miss out. Go download the Matrixport App and enjoy a welcome offer of 30% APY on USDC here: https://invest.matrixport.com/en ======================= Cosmos is building the Internet of Blockchains, marking a new era of interoperability, scalability, and usability. The free flow of assets and data between blockchains with bridges to Ethereum and Bitcoin will unleash the potential of DeFi, NFTs, and much more. Dive into Cosmos at cosmos.network/pomp

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Marcelo Libre is the CTO and co-founder of Remote. Marcelo previously worked as the VP of Engineering at Unibabble and held several CTO positions and is a startup advisor. In this conversation, we discuss the remote working trend, compensation structures, legalities and compliance of paying international employees, democratization and decentralization of wealth, stablecoins, and Bitcoin. Before we get into this episode with Marcello, which I really enjoyed, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Matrixport. Have you lost your

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Go download the Matrixport app and enjoy a welcome offer of 30% APY on USDC for new users. next up are my friends over at cosmos cosmos is building the internet of blockchains marking a new era of interoperability scalability and usability the free flow of assets and data between blockchains with bridges to ethereum and bitcoin will unleash the potential of defy nfts and much more dive into cosmos at cosmos.network slash pomp last but not least are the folks over at near when you think of near you should think of what you can do with it it's an open source platform that accelerates the development of decentralized applications overcoming high fees and slow speeds with its fast, scalable, low-cost, and climate-neutral blockchain protocol.

That's why NEAR was recently awarded the climate-neutral product label from South Pole. One transaction on NEAR consumes about 1,300x less carbon than a similar transaction in other chains. Learn why NEAR is the infrastructure for innovation at NEAR.org today. N-E-A-R.O-R-G today. All right, let's get into this episode with Marcelo. I hope that you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion.

This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. Got a very special treat. I've got Marcelo here with me. For some of you, you may remember that I had Yobe from Remote come on the podcast a while ago, and I'm very, very fascinated by this business because they have become one of the quintessential kind of go-to default softwares for teams that have distributed across multiple countries. And so with the recent rise of remote work, and I kind of chuckle when I say that because it basically smacked everyone in the face during COVID, companies like Remote have really taken off. And there's nobody better to talk about the trends behind it and also to kind of talk about compensation and all the intricacies. So Marcel, thank you so much for joining us today. Super excited about this. Thank you.

Very happy to be here. All right. Let's jump right into the meat and bones. Give us the one or two sentence. What does remote do? What do you do at remote? And then we'll jump into some of the fun stuff. Cool.

So what do we do? Global payroll. think about hiring people um internationally company in country a wants to hire someone in country b that's it that's what remote does what i do i am the cto and co-founder so i build all that i run all the tech stuff in a company that's what i do i asked for two sentences you gave me two words global payroll that means you know what you're doing if uh if you could describe it that simply uh let's if you guys are doing payroll you have tons of data you've obviously talked to literally hundreds, if not thousands of teams, compensation structure ends up being one of the

most complex topics around remote work, mainly because people don't know, should I pay everyone the same based on a single location? Should I adjust for cost of living? How do I actually use compensation to incentivize folks? There's all these different differences. And so how do you think about compensation structure? And what have you seen as some of the best practices? Cool. Yeah, this is a very important topic, especially these days. And it's very important to note that it's mutating quite a lot um if we compare it to what these discussions do even two years ago um let alone five years ago they're completely different right um you used to have this common structure or standard in which you would just discuss like salary ranges usually

by city or by country um and that was it right um some companies especially startups they would even throw in some option share options or some benefits and that was a very closed loop very simple very straightforward you'd often just be able to compare with your best friends neighbors whoever that work for either similar company or company on their own and you could it was very linear now what we see these days with a globalization of of work called whatever you want, future of work, remote work, all that. It just changed everything completely. And the reason for this is because there are fundamentally different perspectives

and expectations around compensation given on people's experience and even their background, their experience, their country. If you discuss, for instance, discussing salary with someone from the U.S., fundamentally different from discussing with someone in the U.K., in France, Portugal, Spain. Why is that? Because countries have deep culture around usually money, the way they handle money in their own hands. So if you throw all this on top of this crazy pandemic and all that in the same mix, what you get is a very fluid discussion. What I mean by this is that for some companies in some areas, it's normal to discuss compensation

very classically, like, this is the range, this is what we do, this is what we pay, period, right? They don't expand. Now, if we start talking about distributed companies, then you can discuss, is this just in the US, in the Americas? Is it worldwide, just in Europe? And then it starts changing quite a lot. In certain countries, the benefits that people expect are a very good portion of the compensation

package. In others, not so much. And I haven't even started to discuss the salary itself. In several cultures, in many different cultures, they're used to being paid quite low wages. Let's talk Portugal, for instance. They were Spain. Compared to the US, compared to UK, Netherlands like very low wages but with all the democratization of work and the remote work this all changed because for one people can literally travel wherever they want to travel to there is a lot of people in big companies relocating to their home countries home cities and that means that something's got to change right are you going to bring your salary with you Is it going to adapt to the local economy?

And so many different companies have completely different strategies. The number one is nothing changes. We pay the same. That's it. This, from our experience and my personal belief, this breaks very easily, right? It only takes for a few people to live in a different city. And that's it. Comparison, people will start.

people will not in this day and age have any reason to stay working for a company that will pay them significantly less than someone another company next door then you have companies that create sort of an equation in which they will adjust the salary based on cost of living the country itself, the expertise or the seniority around it, and make this sort of complex-ish equation in which at the end, there's a number that says, well, you're worth this in this country or that in that other country. Now, this allows for, it's a bit more, it's a bit of a democracy

in a way that gives you a sense that people actually have a choice or a saying in this when you don't really. But it's a bit more flexible because it adjusts to global distribution. Now, there's also a third option, which is something that we also see becoming more and more the thing.

We try to practice this at remote in which it's sort of a... harmonization in a way in which you don't you're not static so you don't say we pay this everywhere and you also don't say we're going to fundamentally adjust this to your wage so what you do is you create a very comprehensive and and sort of fluid dynamic range that allows you to pay considerably better in some countries. What we do, for instance, is we have a threshold in which we don't go lower. So, we have a worldwide threshold and we don't lower that independently. Because in some countries that we hire, if you get that lower threshold,

you're probably going to be the king of a small city somewhere. But even so, it works pretty well because it gives you a good sense of belonging at the same time, very fair compensation, and it also doesn't tie you to where you live. So these three compensation structure or strategies are the ones that we see working more and more these days. The first one is kind of self-deprecating continuously. Second and thirdly, second, it is very well-established. A lot of companies use this, works well for most of them,

especially at scale, because it's a fairly transparent way of calculating wages. Like the third, it requires a bit more effort because it's more people-focused. And so it requires continuous adjustment so that the whole company throughout the world doesn't feel either left out or an outlier for good or for the bad. But all in all, there's a lot of things changing about the compensation structure And we used to see that it used to be just about the money or the salary. Now it's flowing a lot more towards what benefits come with it. Are you somehow given any sort of stake in the company, like options, shares, the benefits that we're discussing?

Is it more just about health? Is it anything else? um is it is it about uh because as you know since the pandemic started people started looking into other things like decent workstation at home which for a lot of people comes as a given but it is expensive like this camera is expensive this test is not super cheap and so for a lot of people this is expensive um and and and it's but it's really worthwhile because this is where you work from uh where you're making money and so it also becomes all these tiny things start to become like this sort of quite fluid and interchangeable um compensation package um and this is this is it it

we we it's not it's not slowing down this change these dynamics um uh what people throw into these compensation packages it's completely uh growing exponentially the complexity of it all and we haven't even started talking about uh different currencies and no way to basically so i was going to say it seems like there's one the compensation package then there's actually the amount of the salary right and that's kind of a global strategy that people have to really uh um set then there is this like free market force that if you as my employer don't really kind of uh do what i think is best i'm just going to leave like see there's other places that'll pay me they'll pay me higher wages given uh regardless of where i work and they're not going to try to just localize it

um so i think there's definitely a shift happening there that then leads to the question of like how do you actually do this so my understanding um of uh some of the complexity here is there's legal there's compliance and then there's actually like wiring right or like or aching or direct depositing and like the actual execution from a technology standpoint so maybe we can go through it in that order of just legal compliance and then the actual technology of executing the transaction um and how you think about it as a cto of remote yeah and there's also a fourth point which is very much security okay which it's very often that people just because when you think about compensation you usually think about banks sending people money the banks big portions big

big chunks of money uh but nowadays i mean with all the technology that you have the way you can just ship money around the world it can be tricky um there's a lot of um of technology that has to go into anti-money laundering stuff and crazy things. Because all of a sudden, for instance, remote, from day one, we're a distributed company. We have no single office anywhere in the world. We have an entity, so a company in 50 countries around the world that will be at 80 to 100 by the end of the year.

And we have people literally across the world. Now, when you're hiring someone, first of all, there's all the usual shenanigans where you go through the hiring process, get to meet the person and all that. So what makes you think that person is not exposed somehow, is not part of a blacklist in whatever end of the world? And that's very complicated because in some ways, well, it's fine depending also on the country, because in some ways, some countries don't really care about this. Other companies are very picky about this. And this is just about filtering people. This is just about understanding where you're actually hiring because are these people actually people? Or are you hiring someone that all of a sudden is like an AI or deepfake in front of camera because you've never actually seen this person? So security of all this, like all of a sudden you have all this data flowing everywhere around the world.

You have your whole personal information, where you are, who you are, where you live, your ID cards, bank information, what have you, all the crazy stuff that people can do with this, right? It's very, very easy these days to impersonate someone with all this data. And so what a lot of companies, I mean, have to keep in mind is that this has to be center stage for any kind of discussions about when you employ people abroad. You have to understand who these people are. So at remote, for instance, we have a process called KYC in which, well, in the onboarding process, you have to upload, of course, the documents and you have to, there's a sort of camera thingy that you have to smile and wave so that we know that you're a real person, that you're not just someone holding a picture and impersonating someone else. And that will validate against a few lists of publicly exposed people, so on and so forth. And it's like if you're not wanted for something really bad and to understand exactly this. Now, the legal part of it all.

What remote does, we have our own entity in all the countries we operate. What does this mean? It means that there is a company, a remote company actually created in this country. When a company comes to us and says, well, a company in the United States wants to hire someone in France, for instance, it means there's a remote France there, and we create a bridge between the two parties, the American company and the French employee. And so we're able to legally bind these two entities in a contract, a working contract, providing clear, local working contract that people expect, because when you're in a country, well, that's what you expect, a fully compliant working contract. And why does this matter? It matters because these days, I mean, the way civilization evolves, the way that you're perceived towards society is very entangled with what you do towards it. If you want to get a loan and go to a bank for it, often it is the case that they'll ask, do you have any proof that you actually make any money?

If we're going to give you some money, we have to have some kind of proof. if you're a freelancer or a contractor you know this this can become quite harder in that way and and same for other benefits within society so having a fully compliant legal working contract locally it allows you to have the best of both worlds one have probably a better compensation because you work you're in france working for an american company odds are your salary is going to be a bit bigger than or better than it would be locally um let alone if we talk about countries like partial. It will easily triple or quadruple your living wage, which means you can have a completely different way of facing your life or quality of life as well. So that's more on the

legal side of things. And then on a day-to-day basis, we essentially use a lot of the technology that we have on our platform to run things so that you don't really have to interact with remote. you're an employee of this company on the other end of the world um you know and about money um the way we go about it it's very simple um your money essentially just lands on your bank account as an employee we as as a globally distributed company there are many things that we do to make sure that your money lands in your bank when your bank accounts when your salary is due the reason for it is because we have to operate at this level so there's a lot of currencies involved in some countries for instance the what the employer wants to know look i want to i want

to hire anthony um i want to pay him a million dollars a week um and that's how much i want to pay him and for you if you're in france or germany whatever you're gonna get your money in euro you don't really care about all that what you have an expectation of being paid in euro and that's it and so um because of the fact that we have multiple entities and multiple bank accounts in all these countries in the world we're able to use the technology to leverage that money to leverage also the fact that money comes from one end we also have our bank accounts in in the incoming currency and we also have the payout currency in which we're going to make sure to pay out um your salary how does it work in terms of the employee if they are an employee of the

legal entity in that uh location and they're not actually an employee of the business in which they you know quote unquote work for uh if there's any sort of like legal hang-ups or uh any sort of contractual disagreements or anything like that uh does that put the employee in a situation where uh they basically are dealing with two entities um or is it very similar to kind of how it traditionally would be as well like i guess like what are the downsides of this type of model versus uh uh what most people think of as like the employment relationship yeah um very little if any so the way that happens is that contractually speaking the employee only deals with one entity which is remote entity the contract which is presented is signed um between the parts

is agreed upon between the employee, remote, and the employer. And this means that there are no surprises. So for one, we own all the legal stuff. So we have our own legal counsel at remote. And that means that we're able, we usually say we own the full stack. So we own all the legal parts, privacy, security, compliance, and financials. financials so all this we can we will discuss in in in detail in a sense and what do i say the detail because it's very very important if you do um in in the traditional ways and some companies

still do this today and probably works for them sure is that there's a standard it's the contract that you present to people and then you either sign it or you go in your own way um with remote it's quite different um the reason why they do this is because they don't really own the entities They use third party services to provide this sort of abstract service, conceptual service at the end of the day, but they don't own it. And what this means is that if you look at your contract and it says, well, well, at the end of the day, you're you're you're first born is actually the employers. And you're like, oh, I don't really want to give up my firstborn. And so they're like, well, we're not really going to negotiate it with you either take it or leave it. And the reason for this is that they don't own that contract.

They don't own that entity. They're just a proxy to that business. And that's why remote is so different, because we own it entirely. And so whatever agreement is going on between you and the company that decided to hire you, we will honor it. Now, there's always a limit, which is what the local law allows us to do. For instance, let's say that your employer asked you to work seven days a week, nonstop, 10, 12 hours a day. In several countries, this is not allowed.

Even if you decide to sign it, at the end of the day, this would not be allowed. And so remote always operates in the best interest of the employee, of course, first, Second, the employer. But thirdly, and also sometimes at zero, I guess, the law, which rules all. And so in several cases, usually there is always a small adjustment based on the country or on the legal implications or if any. Some countries are way more cool than others. Some are really strict about these things. um but that's that's that with remote you were able to literally flex around all the things that happen um which is not the case with the classical way of doing things in the classical way it's just there's a standard contract and that's it there's nothing you can do about it now the biggest

difference between so what you can ask is like what if remote doesn't exist what if your solution didn't exist what then like people still work from different countries to other companies and and this still somehow works well it does in that case you're considered a freelancer contractor you don't really have an employer and that means you don't get to have the benefits you get your salary in whatever currency they can pay you with um and you don't get any of the benefits local benefits in that society because you're a freelancer, you go to a bank, you can't get a loan and stuff like that. Those are the big differences. Got it. And so when you think about the types of assets that you're paying and the currencies that you're paying in,

one of the things that immediately most of the audience is going to jump to is you can use US dollars, you can use a local fiat currency, you can use Bitcoin, you could use a stable coin or some other type of asset. How do you evaluate the different technologies that you could use to actually get the currency to an individual? And is there been or have you kind of operated with Bitcoin or with stable coins? And kind of where are you guys in that journey of evaluating those as potential payment methods?

Yeah, so I can't really tell you what we do, but I'll give a smidge. So there are a few things that go into it. One is, even though it sounds really weird, but in a lot of countries, the local law dictates the currency in which you are paid as an employee, even if you're in a country where currency exchange is not nice to you. So in these countries, there is no workaround unless you're able to make some sort of arrangement in which you can pay in digital assets, Bitcoin, stablecoin, and stuff like that.

Now, this again, it differs quite a lot from country to country. Most countries, they really define as an employee, you're defined by law, your agreement with your employer about the currency that you're paying with. Secondly, in some countries, you do have the option. These countries, often, when you're given an option, it's because something is fundamentally wrong. So a lot of people do, honestly, usually take the currency of the employer, which is very often the US dollar is British pounds or euro. Right. This usually means that the local currency is so bad that even the local government tells you, well, you can get your money in whatever way you can get your money. And then you have a third option in some countries in which you can literally pay in whatever or it's whatever money you can get into that local area.

And that's where things get tough. Now, what we've seen towards and quite connected to this is that currencies, especially, I tend to think that we have this sort of very positive and also privileged position in which we're seeing the world changing. We have entities in all these countries, and we're deeply connected to local government and laws. And we see the changes daily because we get all the updates all the time, all these things. Things are fundamentally changing. However, we now see that currency is an expression of local markets, but that at the same time ring fence the capabilities of the people in it. So this might sound quite fancy, but what it means is that in a lot of ways, currency is a way to limit money from coming in and going out, which in a global and distributed economy is very worrying. Because you see that today you can jump on a plane and just be whatever in a couple of hours.

You can buy a house. There's a lot of countries in which you can get a status for like through internet and get a citizenship without actually going into the country and get all the benefits as if you were born there. One of the things that's really interesting to me about what you all are doing is I think people have this idea of, let's say I live in the United States. I didn't want to move abroad. My employer says, OK, and I moved to pick your country, Italy, and now I'm living in Italy, but I don't stay in Italy. I, 30 days later, decide I want to actually now go to Switzerland and then I want to go to Singapore and then I want to go to Costa Rica and then I want to go to Colombia and then I want to go back to Italy. Does remote empower the ability to almost have like the true nomad type employee or like how are companies handling more of the nomadic lifestyle than just the I move from domestically to some international location and then I'm static in that location? Yeah, I'm going to give you, firstly, the very grim truth of all this.

Okay. The worst part is that when this already happened to us a few times. In fact, you land in a country, you create the entity, you're ready to start your own business like you do in all the other countries. And then, of course, you have to have the legal boundaries in which you operate. And you have a certain business. And what we do is a bit different in some ways. And then you look at the law, and it's like you have to pick where you land, right? So a remote sits here.

And then you're like, this is from the 1950s. They don't even understand the terms that we use to describe our business. It's not like the technology, the business. And you reach out to local council, and they're like, can we have 10 meetings? to try to understand what is it that you guys do. And after that, maybe we have to resort to somehow local government entity that can somehow help us. And eventually, after battling quite a lot,

you will find a somewhat fitting legal representation of what you are and what you do in that country. and so this is unfortunately the true the truth of global employment today a lot of countries in the world are the laws that abide all this um are very very old they are not they they didn't even know what a computer was at the time so this is what we have to work with You have to literally build a supercomputer with dumb bricks. And on top of this, what we can do, and this is what we're trying to achieve. A lot of people say that the future of work is remote work and what have you.

No. The future of work is you chasing your dreams, not spending your dreams to earn some money. This is the utopian world that has been preached for many, many years, even with Star Trek and the likes in which you work in the things that you're passionate about. Like I do today, like you do here. And that's what new societies are about. And this makes no sense to most interpretation of corporate law, legal law, and even finance. the way that we have to tackle this is firstly to create an abstraction that sits on top of all these different countries that for anyone outside of it for anyone that is not remote

this just looks simple right um this means that we have to work our butts off to make it look simple to make sure that whatever beneath remote lands on top of that country we are legal we're enforceable because that's very important um in in some countries you can present whatever contract you want but it's not enforceable um and so by doing this you start creating this sort of a highway for what comes next and what comes next is the definition of digital nomad in which by today's definition is like someone that just doesn't stop anywhere and just travels all year long and that's not what it's all about what it's all about is for you to have the freedom to do whatever the hell you want is for you to decide in which currency you

want to get paid because you decided that it's the best and it's the best thing that suits you same for insurance and same for the compensation that goes around in the benefit package so if you have if you decide to travel quite a lot well let's let's talk basics let's talk about health insurance if you come to portugal and you you need some sort of surgery or if you need something in some emergency or whatever it's fine or our healthcare system is isn't great you actually you can go in and out and you don't pay anything now if if for some reason you go to the u.s or another country in the world now it's a completely different topic and for the digital nomads to be able to exist purely, a lot of things have to change.

And what we're doing, which is the first step, is create a sort of common layer across the different countries, especially the countries that were able to land and sort of create a highway and a mesh network is a common ground to build all this, which is, to be honest, very, very difficult. That's the reason why we've been so successful. It's because if it would be easy, anyone else would just do it. Now, it is indeed the goal in which we want to achieve. Enable whoever, whatever to live from whatever they want and make whatever money they want to

make, talking about different currencies or whatever else. When you think about where we're headed. What does remote look like 10 years from now? It really feels like remote work is going to become the standard. Companies are going to have remote work strategies. They're going to need the infrastructure. So just walk us through, before we go to move to finish up, what does remote look like 10 years from now? So what do we want to become? And this is what we're already representing for a lot of companies that are with us. More than a scaling engine, what we want is the experience that you have whenever you travel. So you get your phone, you're traveling in an airplane,

you land, you turn up your phone, it connects to some carrier. You're not sending texts again. You don't even think, well, will my phone connect somewhere? What kind of connection will I get? What kind of technology is this? This is not something you think about, especially these days. you would 15 years ago. No, you don't. This is the kind of experience that we want remote to be. We want so that when you're creating a company, be it locally, international, or distributed,

what you think is, I'm going to get the best for my employees, and I'm going to get the best employees in the world rather than just the best employees in my street. I'm going to pay the best that I can, and given that, I'm going to get the best people in the world. That's it. You don't don't have to think, well, do I need to get an accountant? Do I need to get a lawyer who's going to draft my contracts? Who's going to pay up people? How about pay slips? What about taxes? Who's going to run taxes? That's not something we want you to think about. What we want you to think about is growing your business, growing your dream. And that's it. That's what we want to be. I think you guys are well on your way to accomplishing that goal. So I'm a fan. A lot

of people who listen to this are obviously fans, users of the product as well. Before we finish up, I always ask everyone the same three questions and then you'll get to ask me one at the end. Uh, what is the most important book you've ever read? The book of five rings. Ooh, that's a great one. Actually, that's a book that a lot of people won't know. Tell us why you think that one is. Yes. So it's a book written by Miyamoto Musashi. The greatest samurai of all time.

Literally. It was very tall apparently. Uh, but it essentially talks about five rings, sort of five different virtues, virtues things that you um eventually as you grow and you go through life and experience you start mastering sort of like the elements until you master the ultimate which is the void with the art of either creating it or filling it and can be literally just using anything in life it's just a bit of inspiration i like the way that even though i go through life in different phases i look at it and it represents different things in different times but it still holds true that is probably one of the best suggestions we've had on this podcast because a lot of people do not

know that one sounds great uh next question comes from our friends over at eight sleep uh i sleep five six hours now i'm eight nine hours if i get my sleep i'm good to go if i don't get sleep i'm cranky and basically an idiot can't think clearly etc uh they've got a thermoregulated bed that they've uh got me sleeping on that is uh basically freezing cold my wife hates my side. She makes hers warm, but mine is freezing cold. What's your sleep schedule and how has that kind of changed over, uh, over the years? Oh, um, I would never was much of a sleeper. I don't like it. I think it's a waste of time. I hate that I need it. Um, and since two years ago, I became a dad to this kid that absolutely hates sleeping. And so I go to bed like maybe 11 PM

midnight i wake up at 6 6 30 um that's it and sometimes 11 to 6 30 that's seven and a half hours you're not that far off yeah that's pretty that's pretty good all right last question aliens are you believer or non-believer uh yeah sure of course why not i'd be crazy not to that might be the shortest answer we've ever gotten yeah of course yeah look i i often say like a bit of a joke like the last year was a pandemic crazy pandemic um and we've gone through really crazy shit around the world and i used to tell my friends when i was a kid and i thought about the end of the day at the end of days i would thought about aliens not a virus that i can see so hey all right you could ask me one question to finish up what do you got for me

what makes you tick happiness that's it i just want to be happy like it's pretty simple um there's something uh fun about it not being very quantitative but you know it when you have it and you know it when you don't have it but if you just constantly pursue uh just being happy then uh then you got a shot so it's pretty much it not not really a groundbreaking answer but uh but you know true and kind of gets right at the core of the whole point of uh whatever ui and anyone else in this world does on a daily basis. So it seems like. Yeah, exactly.

Where can we send people to find you on the internet or learn more about Remote? Remote.com, very easy website to find. And my name, Marcelo, very easy to find online as well. All right. Well, thank you so much for doing this. I really enjoyed it. I think a lot of people are trying to figure out remote work,

how can they pay folks, especially using Bitcoin, stable coins, or any other options, uh, but remain within the legal and compliant, uh, manner. So we appreciate all the work you guys are doing and we'll definitely have to do this again in the future. Likewise.