This Week in Startups - E1052: Range CEO & Co-Founder Dan Pupius shares best practices on building culture as a remote team, insights from working on Google+, importance of asynchronous communication on distributed teams, Holacracy & more!

Episode Date: May 2, 2020

0:56 Jason intros the show & talks about the impact the TWiST Slack has had on him 4:47 Jason intros Dan Pupius of Range 6:13 What is Range and why is it asynchronous & who types of companies is it made for? 10:48 What is the core feature of Range? 15:19 Dan's time at Google, working on Google+ & Google Buzz 21:16 Competing against Facebook's product velocity 24:28 Why did Google+ fail? 29:22 How adoption patterns & network effects played into Google+ not taking off like Facebook 36:57 How to use team communication tools & not come off as overbearing, dealing with unmotivated employees & creating environments that increase motivation 45:02 Burning Man, CyberPunk & more 47:47 Dan shares best practices on building culture as a remote team 52:15 Importance of maintaining "psychological safety" to optimize performance, holding colleagues accountable during high-pressure situations 58:37 Dan's experience developing Holacracy at Medium with Evan Williams 1:06:18 How experience & milestones affect leadership 1:09:21 Potential of "hybrid" remote/in-person offices after going back to work

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impact in the fight against COVID-19. Learn more at SVB.com slash impact. Hey, welcome to this week in startups. It's your boy Jason Kalakanis here in the middle of the pandemic. It's Friday, May 1st, 2020. We found out that our pandemic stay-at-home order here in the Bay Area will be extended through the month of May. And we may get back to some normalcy in June. This has been, I think I started my quarantine on the 12th of March. So all of April, all of, all of, all of, almost all of March and now almost all of June. So this is going to wind up being a 10-week-plus quarantine for me. And I'll be honest, not easy for me because I like people and I like being out there. And I hate not going on and doing things. And so it's been particularly challenging for me, but it's been really nice to connect with all of you and do this podcast.

It's made me appreciate the podcast and the community even more. I mean, I always just love the fact that some of you stop me on the street or see me at a conference or drop me an email or write a review on iTunes and tell me that the show or some guest inspired you or you learn something from it or just kept you entertained on some hike or something. Boy, you know, that is something as a performer or a host of a show that really fills your bucket, charges your batteries. But I wasn't prepared for the amount of warmth, love, and camaraderie I felt when we started our Slack channel. And I just want to thank everybody for showing up in the Slack and talking to me. And a lot of you are like, wow, it's amazing that you responded. It's amazing you showed up.

And I appreciate it. I appreciate all you for listening to the podcast and showing up for me. This is a two-way street. This is how I get my energy. This is how I get my motivation in life is doing this. show. And so I think when these crises happen, you do a little self-reflection. You look at your work, you look at your life, you look at your friendships. And boy, am I a blessed individual? But I may have taken for granted the audience of this week in startups because I don't see you

all the time, right? You just download from some RSS feed, some MP3 file, you listen to it. And, you know, you're sometimes mistaken as a podcast. You just see a bunch of links. You see a bunch of metrics and stats. A couple of thousand views here, tens of thousands of you hear. A couple hundred thousand views overall. But you forget, each of those views is a human. And if you want to join those humans, you're this week in Startups.com slash Slack, and you join.

And a community has formed. Over 20,000 founders in there. And we did an AMA or two, and we have book club, and we just finished our first book. And I have to tell you, the Slack channel, as good as this podcast has been over a thousand episodes,

episodes, after two weeks to Slack channel, I think is as valuable. And in some cases, people might be getting more value from that than the actual podcast. People have told me they've made business contacts, they've made friends, they've had intelligent conversations, they've gotten great advice. And it's not me. It's you. It's all of you as a community. And so I'm just absolutely enthralled. And I can't wait when I click on the icon in my Slack. to see what y'all are talking about in there. Whether it's the book channel, the Small Winds Channel, or I'm going to kick ass today channel.

Sometimes I pop into the Australian or Chicago channels and just say hi to friends. London, big presence in London, the growth hacking channel, all this stuff is just great. And I was very concerned that this podcast would struggle because I thought, God, in order to have a good podcast, I got to look into the eyes of the guest. But we haven't missed a beat.

team here has done a great job of moving this to virtual. And today's guest has a company and a lot of experience in the virtual. He worked at Google. He worked with my friend Evan Williams and my other friend Bistone over at Medium, which is called obvious corporation. Now he's got his own company called range.com. No am there. It's a range.

dot CO, the great CO domain like I use for launch.co. And he's the CEO and co-founder. His name is Daniel Pew Pius. Pupius. Daniel, welcome to the program. And how did I do? Butchering your name. You did a very good job. People really struggle with the pronunciation there. So thank you. Well, it's spelled P-U-P-I-U-S, Pew Pius. And I asked you earlier, like, is it Greek? It feels Greek to me. Well, it's of the Lithuanian descent. But my ancestors came over to the UK in around 1905. So it's quite likely it was corrupted during the immigration process. We did try and track down relatives in Lithuania in the 90s and didn't have any luck. But interestingly, since Facebook, a few people have popped up with a surname. Amazing.

Same thing happened to my family, Calicanis, is Kalikanis with Kay's. It means to have done well or well done. And when they went through Ellis Island, my grandfather, like many folks going through Ellis Island, they just wrote down whatever you said as best they could and told you to keep moving because there was a line. Tell me, what is range.com? Welcome to the program. Hi, yeah. So Range, we're calling it Team Success Software.

Essentially, it's what I wished I had when I was running teams at Medium and Google. It's an asynchronous communication platform that keeps teams connected wherever they are. So at the core is a daily check-in. It's a bit like a virtual stand-up, except we integrate with all your tools. So it's really easy to remember what you're doing and what you have, what you've done. And then we have some culture building components built in. So we have companies like Twitter, Carter, Medium, and they use it to stay in sync, focus on what matters, and also build trust across the team. Let's talk about the asynchronous nature of that. You were very specific to qualify it as asynchronous.

Explain to people who maybe know what that word means, but don't know in this context what that means, and why is that so important? Yeah, so a lot of work practices historically relied on this face-to-face synchronous communication. So synchronous means back and forth, you're doing it at the same time. And those practices have then moved online. So synchronous chat, Slack is very synchronous. You can catch up after the fact. But most of the time, people use it as a conversation. Zoom, of course, is synchronous.

You know, you and I are chatting back and forth now at the same time. So asynchronous just means that you are not present at the interface at the same moment. So an email is asynchronous. I send an email and you receive it an hour later, 12 hours later, it doesn't matter. with range, you do these check-ins or you do objective updates, and then your team can catch up on the work whenever suits them, so as it fits their schedule. I was going to say, it's really important for remote teams because it's really hard to be in the same place at the same time.

You're often time displaced as well as geographically displaced. So if you're in different time zones or you're on different working schedules, you want to stay in sync, async. Yeah, and you don't want to interrupt each other. that is a constant complaint about Slack. And Slack has spent a lot of time building sophisticated tools for notifications that nobody understands, nobody reads, and create massive chaos. I find where people are just like, oh, you know, stop using channels, stop using Adhere,

stop letting everybody know. And then people are like, well, why don't you set your settings and learn how to do that? And so there's a little bit of an onboarding thing. Did you make range. for remote work in mind or agnostic to work? So we started a few years ago, and remote work is definitely on the climb, but we're agnostic in terms of where you're located. One of the core ideas is around work is getting more complex, and the complexity is based

on different factors. So it might be a cross-functional team instead of a purely functional team. It might be remote or multiple time zones, or it might be the nature of the work is more complex. So as the work gets more complex, it becomes more difficult to stay, say, connected and stay, and to coordinate your activities. So Rangers built that with that in mind. And when that said, so I was going to say, that said even before COVID, around two-thirds of our customers spanned multiple time zones. So it definitely resonated with remote teams a lot. And this functional versus cross-functional, if I'm correct in defining that, you're part of the

design team, I'm part of the development team, there's a sales team. They tend to function really well when you're in your tribe, when you're in your group because you have a common language, you have a common ethos typically, maybe even personalities. The sales team's a certain way, the development team's a certain way. You have your own stand-ups. We explicitly say what you're working on. But cross-functional, when the sales team and the product team and the design team and the marketing team all have to get on the call at the same time, that's when things start to break down, isn't it? Yeah, and I think the potentially the challenge or the irony is that

the cross-functional collaboration is where the magic happens. That's when you can move much more quickly and be much more adaptive to the environment that you're working in. So startups are inherently cross-functional. And then even if you look at most product development teams, they no longer operate in these functional silos. You don't have a waterfall model where product hands off to design, design hands off to engineer and there's not any collaboration. You have a work unit who are focusing

on a deliverable or some output and they work together as a team. So the notion of a team is very important here. And you had mentioned something about the core function of this product range being the sort of, I don't know if task management or your to-do list for the day, your intentionality, what do you call it when people explicitly state, here's what I'm going to get done today. And is that the key feature of the software? Is that what everything revolves around? Is that the key piece of data?

Yeah, we call that the anchor habit. It's this core behavior, this core loop. And it has a bunch of really nice properties. So for an individual, you can collect all the things that are on your plate from across the different tools. You say these are my calendar events, these are my Sanna tasks, these are the GitHub issues that are assigned to me. And you bring those together.

and plan your day out. And then you can reflect on what you did yesterday and kind of celebrate it, like all the docs you edited, all the meetings you had, the interviews, the code you submitted. And that makes you feel accomplished. And then the process of sharing that with the team then creates transparency and access to information. So instead of me saying, I worked on this one login thing for Airbnb, you can dig straight into the Git commit or the design doc that I was working on without having to ask me where

to find it. So it has some really nice properties. That's interesting. It's like you're anticipating that when I state what I did today, people are going to have a question, and by linking to it and anticipating your boss's question or your co-collaborator or your adjacent leader in another group, the cross-functionality, cross-function group,

you're anticipating they might want to drill down into that new feature, maybe look at the spec, maybe look at the result, maybe look at the designs, and you could link to the envision, the GitHub, the to-do list, the notion page, whatever it is. Yeah, I think one of the challenges with knowledge management in general is like, I don't know what's interesting to you. And then there's multiple stakeholders, especially in these really, really complex teams, there's product managers, there's designers, there's engineering managers, as executives, there's the, you know, the IT team. So I don't know

what part of my work is interesting to whom. So if I can push that out in a relatively like high fidelity way, people can then pick and choose and have access to information that's important to them. So it's much more of a kind of like published subscribe model than a, um, than a sort of direct distribution model of this information is important to you. All right. When we get back from this quick break, I know you worked at Google on Gmail, uh, and you worked on the Google plus the failed gigantic huge white whale of a project and you got looped into that. I want to hear all about that and how it informed what you're doing with range when we get back on this week startups. Have you been itching to upgrade your workstation? Well, Dell for entrepreneurs wants to

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I actually have a 491 inch one at home. That one is bonkers. I have two computers plugged into it simultaneously. So we can have two different sessions going for two different projects I'm working on. It's a crazy way to do it.

You don't have to go that far. I think you just go with the 38. But if you want to go crazy like me, get the 49 inch. That's the future. Okay. Let's get back. this amazing episode. All right, welcome back to this week in startups. It's May 1st, 2020,

if you're listening to this 100 years in the future. We're in the middle of a pandemic. It's called coronavirus, COVID-19, and we're in, God, I don't know, six, seven weeks into a stay-at-home order here. And my guest today, virtually over the Zoom, is Daniel Pupius. He is on the Twitter, D-P-U-P, if you want to follow him, four-letter, club and the company's range not cia which has been working on for the last couple of years they've raised a little bit of money from some known suspects like first round and general catalyst and bloomberg beta a bunch of our friends in there and ellen pow as well interesting but trying to get her onto the podcast for a while but she's she's kind of podcast shy um so

you worked at google that's right and uh You worked on Gmail chat, I know that, and you worked on, you got looped into Google Plus. For people who don't know, Google got obsessed with the ascension of Facebook at a certain point. They decided to pour a couple billion dollars into having a co-existor, maybe not a killer, but at least a co-existor having a stake in social media. So they created plus.gulgoogle.com. Eventually it got turned off. It did get some decent traction and had some amazing world-class design. functionality. Tell me first how you got looped into that, tell us that story. And then

ultimately, why you think it failed. I have my own, I have two theories myself, which I'll get into, but you tell me yours. Yeah, I think it's a really interesting story. And I'm very curious what the internet historians will make of it when they bring everything together. But I was on the Gmail team. I had an infrastructure group who were building the foundation for the next gen Gmail infrastructure. And Google Buzz, I'm not sure if you remember Buzz, but Buzz, it's just shut down. And then Google was trying to figure out

what the social thing looks like. Take a moment to explain Buzz, because that to me was an unbelievably cool experiment. Yeah, it was born out of the status update in Gmail chat, where it basically became this log and then people could have conversations around it. So it was right in, inside Gmail and it became like a really cool thing that we used inside Google.

And then there were just a few hiccups around the rollout and around access to information that caused it to be shut down. But it was a very interesting idea. And I really liked that it was part of the main Gmail UI and so integrated with the chat product. If I remember correctly, you would be in Gmail. Everybody knows on the bottom left, you have this chat functionality that you worked on. But then Buzz kind of went in between it and you could have this like threaded discussion and it automatically popped up a social network based upon your inbox or based upon your your address book yeah basically yeah so instead of uploading your address book to Facebook uploading it to LinkedIn and having it build the

network there it was like well why not just turn on the network this right here the problem was is somebody had a stalker in their email box or somebody had an X who was abusive that I think that was the case that somebody wrote a blog post about that got a a lot of press, popping up an instant social network, you may not want to be in a social network with your abusive X, right? That was the thing that killed it

and made everybody freak out was that the permission wasn't explicitly granted to build a pop-up social network, correct? Yeah, exactly. That was the main problem. Now, Zuckerberg would not have had a problem with that. He would have just done it.

I think that's, the people at Google actually cared and were very considered about having done this and moving fast and maybe breaking some things in the process, right? I think it's expectations and trust. So Gmail at that point was a very established product.

It had a lot of users. People relied on it and had these expectations about how it functioned. So it's natural for a product team to want to think about how can you deliver more value to your existing customer base. Yeah, but then it broke user trust because the users had this expectation about the contract that Gmail is private, it's private email, that they're in control. And that was the ultimate issue. Why didn't it, why didn't you then flip it to or didn't the team flip it to? Here's Google Buzz. You click on it and it says, Google Buzz will take your address book and build a social network out of it.

So you can see what your friends are up to. Currently, 13 of your 100 most trusted friends are using it. Click here to join the fun. And when you click to join the fun, it says these are the 100 people you're going to be connected with. Please remove anybody you don't want. Did the team fight for that actually and not and get shut down? Honestly, that was above my pay grade. You were just building it.

I was working on infrastructure to support the product teams. So I was thinking about the strategy of how all the pieces fit together and delivering them the building blocks for the applications. What do you think of my idea as an approach to the product launch? obviously you're a very sophisticated product person. Would that not have worked? Should they have kept doing that? Yeah, I think it's difficult to figure out how to backpedal and whether the trust was completely broken at that point.

And then you have to backpedal even further than Nestle you wished. So some of the theory, I think, was then to go off and create a separate product, which had some of the properties of Google Buzz, but then also integrated features that were previously in Google. in i google um see this is the the actual core of

i believe silican valley's moral compass issues if you're a good actor and you shut the thing down because you made an honest mistake and you broke trust and then you're up against a competitor who does not care about trust cares only about growth

it is almost impossible to win. And that competitor is obviously Zuckerberg, who allowed people to auto join groups. And you probably remember this. He created a product where I could add you to a group. And the day that this thing came out, they added Mike Arrington, the former editor of TechCrunch, Zuckerberg and myself to Nambla. The National Man Boy Love Association, like a pedophile group. They created a fake pedophile group and added us to it. You know what Zuckerberg's response to that was? Only your friends can do that. And everybody was like, well, yeah, but why don't you just make it opt in? And he's like, well, you should just have better friends who don't do stuff like that. And it's like, that's the competitor

Google was up against, right? I want to hear your thoughts on that as like the Zuckerberg competitor and competing against that level of product velocity, that level of move fast, break things. Yeah, I mean, I think it goes back to just the, you know, the core values of the company and the history. And Google had been built out of a very different, it was a very technical culture. They didn't really understand social in the way that Mark does. And yeah, I think it was a very difficult situation for them to navigate. And there was a lot of internal discussions and there's huge teams dedicated to this. Lots of stakeholders, very complex efforts that were very challenging. Yeah. So explain to how Google Plus then came to be. Because Google Buzz, I guess you had some,

that gave everybody like a little bit of hope, like, hey, we can build a cool product. Yeah. I mean, I think there was this interesting moment where there was, um, there was, There was visibility into the possibility of what Google could do, and there was excitement about the type of product we could build. There's some really great product thinkers and designers and engineers. So it was this amalgamation of teams that came together, people out of EyeGoogle, which was starting to have some social elements, and then the Buzz team.

And then, you know, Vic came along and took over leadership of the effort, and we had this 100-day sprint to ship something, and it was just like a huge effort. At one point we had 280 people contributing code to the same JavaScript binary, which at that time was really unheard of. So it was a pretty wild effort. Yeah, thousands of developers,

thousands of people eventually were on the Google Plus team. Yeah, tangentially, yeah. Now, the product was growing like crazy because Google decided to put it in the toolbar on the top right. And plus, so people, if they don't remember, plus was if you liked something in the blogosphere or other places, you would put plus one. So it was just the original star or thumbs up or like was plus one. So if you were in favor

of something, you'd say plus one, like add one to that, right? It was a very clever, very Google on brand for Google. What was it that made, in your opinion, Google plus not work? Despite the fact that it got a lot of users. I think ultimately all these things become organizational failures. And in the case of Google Plus, I think the values and the vision of the people on the ground building the product diverge from the vision and values of the people leading. And that dichotomy created a bunch of tension and meant that we were ineffective and eventually couldn't sustain. I think there's a number of examples, but the most sort of public example is the real names policy, which there's a lot of external press about this

and internally there's a huge amount of furor and a lot of Googlers really were against the real names policy but you know it was an executive decision to stick with it and then ultimately they explain what the real names policy is yeah the real name's policy was that you couldn't create a pseudonymous account you had to have an account which represented your real human name

so I would only be able to show up as Daniel Pius which for me is is fine and I have a public persona that is on all my social products. But for a lot of people, that isn't safe and causes a bunch of issues. And one of the powers in the early web was that people could have multiple personas and multiple pseudonyms. So in one community, you might be, like, I had a, like, I was Lazarus in one community. I'd be deep up in another, and another I'd be like a different persona. And that was like a really powerful construct in the early web that a lot of Googleers really liked. And then as you look at people from different backgrounds and different social situations, being able to show up in

a social product, not with your real name, is like a requirement, essentially a safety requirement. So that was why internally a lot of people didn't support the real names policy. Yeah, and if you peel back the onion even more and take a deeper look at it, we're in San Francisco where there are groups of people who just showing up and existing in the world could be beaten and murdered, trans people, gay people, marginalized people. Like, their very existence could, on one of these social networks, could lead to massive harassment. And the only reason to not attach your real name to it is advertising or you want to

maintain the integrity of the network. Like, you could, there's other ways to deal with that that are very simple. You can allow people to have a pseudonym. And if they behave badly, just look at the behavior as opposed to looking at the name, right? Yeah, I think there's a theory that if people, which I don't agree with, but if people had their real name associated with the account, they would behave better. So the quality of the discourse would be higher. And I think, yeah, how's that going?

I think 10 years on, that has been distinctly proven false. You know, that was one I think I got partially wrong because I was thinking about normal level-headed people. So you're like, well, a level-headed person is not going to say things on LinkedIn with their real name that they might say in an IRC room with a, with a pseudonym. But then we look at Facebook and people are more than willing to say racist stuff or crazy stuff. And when you actually get all people onto a social network, the concept that a real name

protects you is problematic. Although verifying people is another interesting thing. We get back for this quick break. I want to get more into the details of how range works. And I were real my reasons of why I think Google Plus failed. And I want to get your feedback on my outsiders view as a social media addict who loved and was one of the, I had 600,000 people following. me on Google Plus. I had a real following there and I love the product.

And we get back on this week and start. An uncertain time supporting your community and growing relationships with your customers is a strategy that will be appreciated, remembered, and shared. In good times and bad, open and empathetic communication with your customers is key. It's critical. Email is and always will be one of the best channels for delivering these communications. We all know that email marketing is one of Clavio's core offerings. And when you leverage personalization driven by a 360-degree view of the customer, those emails will

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Visit Clavio. That's K-L-A-V-I-O.com slash T-W-I-S-T to start a free trial. Thanks again to Clavio for supporting independent media like this week in startups. Let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, Daniel Puyas is here. He is D-P-U-P. We're having a fascinating discussion, not just about his startup range.com, which helps teams be more productive, especially when they're remote.

and we're going to get into some more of the features there and some more thoughts on remote work and best practices when we get to our third act. But we're having a fascinating discussion about, I guess, recent history, but not history or recent events that have our five or ten years past like Google's foray into social networking, which we eventually led with them giving up. I had a couple of ideas of why it didn't work. And I love the product. I think actually at the time, Google Plus was a better product than anything else in the market. Just heads up on features and design and everything. And a lot of people felt out. I'm really proud of what the team built.

Yeah. The team did an incredible job. It was gorgeous. It was responsive. It was global. I mean, it was extraordinary. And the circles, people forgot about circles. You could create circles, which were subset of groups, which eventually Facebook copied with, like, close friends.

and the ability to create friends and family of these sort of things as Zuckerberg is prone to do like watch whatever features people do and then just try to incrementally make them better or release them. I think the fact that Google Plus did not have its own domain name

and brand and destination where they had 100% of the marketing space and interface I think was a challenge and I think that plus.gulgul.com or whatever the domain structure was was a bit of a mistake because you'd never had this ability for it to stand alone in the way

YouTube or Instagram do or Beetz does inside of Apple and having this collection of brands, Xbox inside of Microsoft, or even like, like Bing is its own search engine owned by Microsoft, right? And I felt like Google had not figured out that they could have a brand that stood next to Google that was adjacent. How much of that, if they had plus.com, do you think that could have changed the dialogue if they said, hey, listen, plus is over here, Google search and Gmail are over here, YouTube is over here. These things, you can use the same account to log into them. You can share your address books. There's some commonality, but it is its own thing if you want to use it or not. Yeah, I don't know, because there's Orkut, if you remember Orkut, which was really big

in Brazil and a few other countries in India. A 20% time project that Google did. Yeah, well, I had a team, but I think it might be related to the adoption pattern. So Google can fast track a huge adoption just by the presence and the, as you know, it's in the toolbar. But if you think about Facebook's adoption pattern, it went through the universities and it went through companies. And each of those had essentially at war-to-wall critical mass within a community. So they got nice saturation within small communities before padding out, whereas Google, I think, had some saturation within communities, but it was generally quite sparse. And if you think about network effects,

that would be my sense why it didn't take off in necessarily the same way as Facebook. Right. So there might have been a large number of people there because they blasted it to everybody. However, your tribe might have only 5% of your tribe might have used it. So it felt like a ghost town.

So there were a lot of people in a small number of communities. Yeah. Which made it feel shallow at times. I agree with you that I think Circles was a really powerful feature. I think it was also a little bit confused. using to people because it's both

it's with a consumption mode as a way of organizing your consumption of who shows up in my feed but there's also a way of distributing content so I'm going to push stuff to my family and then I'm going to consume in my family and it kind of blurred two models it was kind of tricky but it was so brilliant it would be as if on Twitter and this would be such an amazing feature somebody

clip this and send it to the new product manager over there and that mentioned him please somebody in the audience and Jack imagine if a Twitter list if a Twitter list had everybody following you could become also a DM list or a share list in private. So I could have a DM list or I could have a Twitter list that was my portfolio companies. And when I tweeted to it, I could click a button and say only to them in DM, start a DM or send a tweet only to them. And then that would be circled and colored, you know, with a background and say only for members of this list.

A private tweet. So I could have a private, such public feed going. Too complicated or brilliant? I think one difference with circles was that circles would be my list and then you'd have a different list. So they weren't necessarily shared. So it wasn't clear to different people what the group was. So if the Twitter list is shared, then you have a clear audience and a clear grouping, which is then guiding the distribution and the consumption. So I think people need, in social products, people need to know who the audience is, who are you speaking to?

Right. Yeah. It was super cool also that you could have, like, you could bring two circles together. So you could share something with your family and work and then say only work, only family. So you had this like really neat way of, I created like a tribe for New York, L.A. and San Francisco. So when I was in each city, I could say, hey, I'm here. Anybody want to get coffee? And it was like my, it really started to work for you.

I invested all of this amount in it. And the other thing I think was, you just didn't have, you know, Larry and Sergey. I remember Sergey like posted twice. and he responded to one of my things I had my daughter when she was like three years old eating a slice of pizza she's like oh she loves crossed and you know like I was like oh wow

Sergey Brin's on here cool you know but then that was it and I don't think Larry ever even opened it so if the leaders of the company are not participating that does create I think a little bit of a tell right yeah it's the spoken values and the lived values so there was

I think this is public knowledge but there was a social bonus where the bonus was tied to Google social efforts. So that's speaking as if the social is a really core mission, but then the lived and felt values were obviously very different. So I think this goes to just general organizational practice and startups, is that you have to walk your talk and the spoken values have to map your live values, and you can yell as loud as you want about what you want people to do, but unless you actually, your actions are guiding and your behaviors are guided by

your true values, people won't follow you and they won't pay attention to the things you think they want. That's a really interesting observation. I always say this to founders when they're presenting, you know, show don't tell, show the product working, show a customer using it, don't tell us about products using it, your customers using it. In a way, in management, show don't tell is applicable here as well as just a simpler way to say what you said much more eloquently, which is show that you love the product. I thought when, Zuckerberg and Joe Green did like a live where they were making meats and they were smoking meats in their backyard and it became like a whole meme and they made these weird things about

smoking meats and sauces or whatever it at least showed that Zuckerberg you know as awkward as he is on camera was willing to be on camera right it's like oh wow they're using and then Cheryl Sandberg you know she she's she's active on Instagram you know she's she's active on She uses the product, right? And that is super important. I think that's a really interesting observation about management. One of the thing I wanted to talk to you about was how to, you know, with your product or without your product, just, you know, big picture and tactical. How does one as a leader and as a team member not have these new tools, whether it's Slack or yours or Asana,

or notion, whatever people are choosing to use to keep track of work, how do you keep them from being authoritarian micromanagement and big brothers watching versus celebrating, informing co-workers and creating that esprit de corpse, as they say? Yeah, I mean, I think it goes to values. Like the tools can be used however you want them. and the usage is a manifestation of your value system. So if you want to use these tools as surveillance and overbearing command and control leadership, then you can do it that way.

My belief and my hope is that most leaders today don't really want to live that way, and they live that way out of fear. They don't truly believe that, you know Theory X, Three Y, Leadership Theory. The theory is you're de facto lazy and you need both a carrot and a stick to motivate you. Theory Y is you're inherent. motivated to do good work and you just need the conditions to do good work. So I don't think many people believe in theory X anymore, but they act as if they act in those ways because they're essentially fearful. They don't know what's happening.

They are worried that they're going to miss targets. They're dependent for things that they maybe can't act on themselves. So they become overbearing and they become command and control. So I think my goal with something like range and these other tools is to creates systems which can create visibility and transparency such that those fears don't manifest as much. So I trust that you're doing your work because I see the visibility and I trust that you're doing okay, like emotionally and at your job. And then I can actually like relax my controlling tendencies. So that's sorry, but I think ultimately if you if you believe people are inherently lazy, then then you can use any of these tools in bad ways. And I think for people who have the

the luxury and the privilege to work where they want. They should work with leaders who, you know, believe in empowerment and believe in transparency and purpose and align themselves with leaders who match their value systems. I've been struggling with this because I created my own little lightweight way of doing this, which was, you know, I just started to get overwhelmed with the number of people reporting into me and I don't like micromanaging people. So I said, just send me an EOD, end of day report, three or four bullet points by email. We moved to slack since because people wanted to put in Slack. And then when we went full virtual, I said, just give me an SOD, start a day and an EOD.

And you can reply to one, you just do the other, just your intention of what you're going to get done today. Yeah. The problem with that is, is, you know, you run this risk of somebody not having a great EOD and not having an SOD that's inspiring. And what I told everybody is if you feel your EOD is not where you want it to be, you're not proud of it, you're not enthused about it. Talk to these three people in the organization about. what else you can do to help the mission and to move the ball forward. Yeah. What, one, do you think I handled that right?

How does one handle the fact that in any organization, there are some people coasting. That's why there is a joke about Huli and the roof and people resting, investing. And listen, you worked at Google. You know there's people resting and investing at Google in a major way. It's part of the culture, actually. So how does one deal with that fact that maybe not everybody is running as hard and getting as much, making as much impact as other people. And it becomes quite apparent. Yeah. I mean, I think that's, that's a really huge question. Um, unpack a few pieces. Um, so I think, so ultimately it comes back

to motivation and how, and how are people motivated to, to act or behave? And there's a bunch of theory around that. So people, I like Daniel Pink's work. So people are motivated by purpose. They want to have like a North Star or like a mission that they're aligned with. They want to have masteries. They want to get good at a craft or get better at they're doing. And they want to have a level of autonomy, so they don't want to be controlled by other people. And in many organizations, people don't honestly know why their work fits into the big picture. They're not getting better. They look at their work day to day and it hasn't changed in two months or two years. And they don't have autonomy because they have these people who are controlling them and they're dependent

on all these other people. So of course, they end up being unmotivated. And then they move into these behaviors that look like they're coasting. So I think that's one element. And then the, but to speak specifically to your start of day, end of day, What I like about these habits is that they create this ritual. And if you can create an environment where people are comfortable giving a start of day or an end of day report that isn't perfect or isn't great, then that actually is a really great signal because it means you have psychological safety. And then you have this environment where people are able to act without the fear of negative consequences. And then as a leader, you can then go, hey, what happened today? Do you need some help?

Are you unclear about your priorities? or like, are you sick? Do you need to take some time off? Are you burnt out? Like, you can start having conversations about why there was a gap in expectations in reality. And if you don't have that safety, then you can't have that conversation. And then things get more polarized. So people get more anxious.

They get more reserved. They spend more time trying to look like they're working instead of actually working. So it's this spiral into lack of effectiveness. Of people being able to, in their report, say, today sucked. I didn't get anything done. It was all blockers and roadblocks. And I was in a funk and I was exhausted because the kids kept me up at night.

I actually really never created the space for that in my EOD. And I think that's actually a really interesting punch up is to tell people, listen, if it was a crummy day, for the love of God, you know, just say you phoned it. It'd be great if somebody's like, listen, I phoned it in today. And the boss was able to say, like, hey, tomorrow's a new day. Because we all know there's days when you're sitting in front of that computer in the office and you're there for eight hours, but you're not there. And nothing got done.

Even the best people have those days. So if you can create an environment where they can talk about that, that's like the best place to be because then you can start correcting the conditions that led them to have those days. So ultimately, this is actually the core checking behavior in ranges. We only do it once a day, but it's what's your plan for the day, which is like your EOD. and then what happened previously, which is like your end of, sorry, start of day. And then what happened previously, which is like your end of day. And then we have some culture components that are designed to build belonging and connectedness,

especially in remote teams. All right. When we get back for this break, I want to talk about building culture remotely, if you have a little more time for us when we get back on this weekend startups. Great guest. As we navigate uncertain times, Silicon Valley Bank believes that collective action is the best way to overcome the challenges we're all up against. This is why Silicon Valley Bank. Bank in partnership with Founders Pledge has formed the COVID-19 Global Impact and Innovation Fund.

The fund will deliver resources directly to organizations around the world that can help make the most immediate impact in the fight against COVID-19. Silicon Valley Bank has made an initial $1 million investment to fund this critical work and invites you to join them in helping those in need. Silicon Valley Bank continues to offer solutions that supports small businesses and the innovation economy. For more than 35 years, Silicon Valley Bank has supported countless innovators with a passion for solving the world's biggest problems, and today remains committed to helping its clients and employees and our communities manage through these uncertain times. To learn more about the Silicon Valley

Bank, COVID-19, Global Impact and Innovation Fund, visit SVB.com slash impact. Again, that's SVB.com slash impact. All right, Daniel Pupias is with us. Follow him on the Twitter, D-PU-P. Like a pew and being pious, Pew Pius. Easy to remember. D pup. The D pup. It's also his rap name. Is that your Pliar name as well or is a different Pliya name?

When I'm on the flyer. You have not been to the Pliar. What? But you work at Google, medium, obvious? She probably hate me saying this, but my wife went a bunch and then by the time we were together, she was all over it. I'm really interested in Burning Man 2021. it's either going to be the greatest burning man ever or it's going to be terrible.

Because having a thousand or two thousand people dancing tribally around robot hard or whatever it is. Like it just, yeah, I hope we can do that. It's interesting to think about cyberpunk fashion with the pandemic and what does like post-pandemic? like Reve outfit look like. You've got masks. You've probably got, you know, it's just very interesting. Yeah, I think we're part of the same generation

in terms of cyberpunk. Did you pre-order the cyber truck from Milan? Or what did you think when you saw it? I don't have space in my garage. We live in a loft. Yeah, but I mean, what did you think when you saw that roll out? Yeah, it looked like something out of a computer game.

Yeah. This is amazing. Well, I'd say also interesting. I think the Gibson series, Adiru All Tomorrow's Party, you read that one? Yeah, all of them, yeah. I've really great.

Read everything by Gibson. Yeah, I mean, it's just amazing. And a lot of these young kids don't know him. He's kind of like this night. It's really creepy. What's that? It's creepy. He predicts the future five years ahead of it.

Yeah. I feel like pattern recognition is my life. It really is interesting because he was talking about people. I remember I was kind of, my mind was blown. They were in a virtual space in that story. And they really wanted to buy the perfect kimono to wear to this important meeting with the person who was running this other massively online community. And my favorite part of it was the Bay Bridge had been knocked out on both sides. And people were living in the Bay Bridge.

And it was like its own community. Yeah. Every time I drive across the Bay Bridge, I think about that visual. Yeah. And I wish they'd left the bridge up and turned it into a park. And then that would have been perfect. When I saw they were building that other new part of the Bay Bridge, I said, why don't they leave the other stand? that was ripped up metal instead of shipping it to China, which I think was what they did,

make it into some park and some incredible high line like feature. And they just ripped it apart. It was so dumb. Terrible lack of creativity. All right. Let's talk about building culture over when remote, best practices, things you've built into the tool. How do we build that trust? How do we make this real when it's virtual?

Yeah, I think, so to go meta a little bit, the underlying issues that many work practices are built on these informal ad hoc interactions. So you don't intentionally build culture. Culture emerges through interactions in the kitchen or in the desk and the cubes or like how you show up at Happy Hour. So when you go remote, you don't have the opportunity for those informal interactions. So you have to be much more intentional about how you actually cultivate the different types interactions within your organization.

So if you look at the best companies, best remote companies, they're just incredibly intentional about their culture. They essentially design it. And this is something I talk to a lot with startup founders is design your company like a product. You have all these tools for how you make great products, apply the same principles to how you build your company. So look at the problems you're trying to solve, look at the user needs, and then work

through that to identify the processes and practices that work for your company. And it's the same with remote. I think a few things I'd say immediately, because that's probably a bit too abstract, would be to essentially create a cadence. So what your check-in. So think about the week as having bookends at the start and the end. So maybe all hands briefing at the beginning of the week

and then a recap where you do some fun stuff at the end of the week. And then over the course of the week, what are the check-in points? So we check in asynchronously daily. And then each team has these collaboration hours twice a week, where they get together and problem solved, do demos, just like talk as a team. And that creates this nice rhythm to the week.

And that creates this backbone of culture building. Yeah, I've always had my entire career, you know, for two decades and three startups, lunch with Jason on Wednesdays. It's just like to call up to CEO lunch, which really doesn't have an agenda. People like to introduce agendas and make it the staff meeting. I just call it lunch. And I've always had this problem where I would try to order great food from like a very unique place and make the lunch amazing and beautiful.

Like this is the hot new restaurant in San Francisco. Somebody drove over there in an Uber. They don't deliver. We got the food. We brought it here. We told everybody what the lunch was. It's from this new barbecue joint. I just try to make it a little bit more special.

And I got like resistance on that. I'm curious how you deal with people who are, I don't want to say culture killers, but culture resistant. So you're trying to build a culture. We were talking about EODs. I had somebody who was, I wouldn't say it, the highest performer, but a solid contributor. And when I asked him to do EOD,

is he just kind of like blew a gasket. He's no longer here, obviously. But it's just like totally felt like I didn't trust him. And I was like, it's not about trust. It's about knowing what's getting done so that I can be informed as the person who's responsible for $30 million of capital being deployed and you being one of the top three lieutenants.

Like I have a duty here. This is beyond your ego or my, you know, being a taskmaster. and this has to do with our fiduciary responsibility to investors. Yeah, I mean, I think this is one of the hardest things in management is it's essentially diagnosing the, like the behavior and the root cause. And in this case, maybe he was fearful, like he was insecure about his work and he thought he was being monitored. So there are things that potentially were systemic that affected it.

But there can also be, again, like values misalignment. And I think one way to think about teams is, are you a golf team or a basketball team? So golf teams, like they go out and they play their game and then they add the score up at the end. Some people love working that way. Other people want to be a basketball team where you do the play together and you're passing the ball around and it's very dynamic. Yes. And if there's a mismatch between those two, it's just going to be like a non-starter because you can't have a solo player on a basketball team. Like you have to play as a team.

I love that metaphor. Can you have those two types of teams in one company? Within a company, yeah. And I think that's actually one of the super interesting things that I've learned. over the last year working with our customers is that the variance between companies is often lower than the variance within a company. So two teams at Twitter might look way different, more different than a team at Twitter and like a 30-person startup that we're working with. So it's really quite interesting.

What is psychological safety mean? I know there was a people hear this term a lot. I want to really get your definition of it because I know they did a survey at Google on teams. And that was the number one. And we had Kim Scott, formerly Kim, I forgot her left. Yeah, Kim's great. Yeah, and she was my AdSense rep back in the day. I knew her by her previous last name, which I just drawing a blank on here. But she did the book Rattle Kakandar, but

psychological safety came up over and over and over again in that study when they looked at people in these groups. And let's face it, you know, Google's got very unique kind of individuals, I would say. Yeah. Honestly, this is kind of one of my pet piece because the concept of psychological safety is around for decades and it wasn't really acknowledged until Google did their project Aristotle as being something that was worth paying attention to. And now everyone talks about psychological safety. But essentially, if you look at great teams and great performers, the people act in ways without fear. So they don't fear

negative consequences to themselves through failure or speaking up. So if I'm in a staff meeting and my boss proposes a project and I think that project's got a really big problem with it. If I don't have psychological safety, I won't speak up and warn them because I'm worried about reprisals on me in that meeting. If I have psychological safety, I will speak up and say, hey, you haven't thought about this other issue and then you get the most out of the team. So psychological safety essentially means you feel accepted and respected by your peers and that you can act without fear. And you see this in professional sports when a teammate, when teammates get a fight and it cracks.

There was a famous photo of LeBron James when he had J.R. Smith on his team and J.R. Smith is a headcase on a good day. I don't know if you follow basketball. I don't follow basketball. No. Okay. So I just imagine having somebody who is like, yeah, would like literally light a cigar up in the locker room like in 2020 or literally J.R.

Smith was known for when they were, when he was on the neck. people were shooting free throws and while during the game he would lean over and untie another player's shoes and he did it like three or four times a completely inappropriate like Dennis Rahman like baby and there's this famous photo of like he he didn't take a time out or he he called a time out when they didn't have one and LeBron James is like crying with his hands and his palms up like what are you doing and it became this iconic image and now people use it it's become meamed because it's when your teammate does something so incredibly stupid that that you're so incredibly disappointed.

They don't play together anymore. And there's the image. LeBron James is so upset. But it's more disappointment than anger. And then you had obviously the Kevin Durant and Dremont and Dremont. Dremont Green also kind of like breaking down. How does a team hold each other accountable, you know, in intense situations where a lot is at stake? and emotions are high,

how does one keep the expectation high, you know, address the fact that, yes, emotions can run high when things are at stake, like an NBM championship or a startup's very existence or a major investment. Unpack that for me of how to be intense and have high expectation culture and psychological safety at the same time.

Yeah, I mean, I think I would argue that you, you don't have accountability without psychological safety. So let's take the example where someone's got this bad idea in a meeting and I don't feel able to speak up about it. Do you think I am now committed to that project? I am now not committed to that project because I'm like, I know it's going to fail because I've had this belief that I'm just not able to speak up about it. Then as the project goes on, I will not be, I will always have that in the back of my mind that that's not going to be successful. And then when it doesn't succeed, like I don't have any ownership in the lack of success because I never thought about that in the first place. So I think what's great about psychological safety is it allows you to have that conflict and it allows you to speak up and disagree with each other.

It doesn't mean having lack of emotions. It doesn't mean not arguing or making, you know, I think maybe LeVron James had a huge amount of psychological safety because he was able to yell at his teammate and know that they would be able to get back together and play the rest of the game. So I think if you want a highly successful team, you want to get the most out of everyone. And in order to get the most out of everyone, you need to make sure that they feel able to speak up and represent themselves. What's the difference, if a difference at all, in this culture building when you have introverts and extroverts who have very different concepts and constructs around culture? What is culture to an introvert that I don't understand as an extrovert who says culture should be us all having dinner or us playing tennis or us going on a hike or us doing like some crazy activity together? And introverts, that's not what they want to do necessarily. Yeah, I mean, I think introverts don't want a lack of emotional and social connection.

It's just it's more difficult for them. And they still seek connection. It's just in different ways. And extroverts can feel overwhelming to them. So I think this goes to aspects of inclusion. And it's creating environments where everyone can be involved. So can you create a team building effort that works really great for the extroverts that want to jump up on stage and do karaoke as well as the introverts who might just want to play a board game? or a game of poker and having like a mix and match of activities that can speak to different energy levels.

And the reality is that most people are on a spectrum between intrepete and extrovert, and they oscillate up and down that spectrum at different times. So people can be more extroverted or less extroverted on a given day. So it's just being thoughtful about that and creating environments which accommodate different people. Yeah, you worked with Evan Williams, a good friend of mine. And I think sometimes Evan doesn't know how to like actually handle being in the same room with me. I think he's entertained. but he's a super thoughtful introverted guy.

But he also shows amazing parties. But he has incredibly great parties. Right. And he sings songs in front of the whole company. Yes. He operates in that spectrum. What do you think is holocracy thing that he tried and my friend Tony Shea tried? I don't know if you're part of that holocracy camp.

I was, yeah. You were. From day one, yeah. Did you insert holocracy? Are you the cause of it? And what do you think is the legacy of that? It seemed very promising and then I don't hear about it anymore. Yeah.

Tell everybody what it is and what the, what the arc has been for holocracy. So I've brought it into medium and he'd talked with Tony Shea and a few other people and thought it sounded like an interesting model. And the way to think about holocaies is essentially, it's essentially a rule set. They call themselves an operating system, but it's a rule set for how to run the company.

And it's oriented around notion of self-governance. So in the ideal world, a team is completely autonomous and can describe their own work and describe how they work and has processes for evolving that, which might sound not that extreme, but it has a very rigorous rule set that kind of keeps it from becoming chaotic. So there's teams of circles and then circles can have circles inside and then you have roles. So it detaches title from role, which is kind of interesting and has explicit accountabilities. And then it has these processes for how you modify the constitution, as it were, or how you resolve what they call tensions or like issues, which is based on other practices like sociocracy, which has like integrative decision making, which is another formal process for resolving, resolving hard decisions in a, in a group. Has it worked anywhere because Holocracy was a new concept. I know Tony kind of, I don't know if he deprecated it or he kind of, he kind of, he kind of, he kind of, of took the gas off of it. I didn't know Evan took the gas of it. People wanted more structure is what I heard from both of them is that people didn't want to be responsible in large part

of defining their role. They wanted their role defined for them, but they wanted autonomy. And was that the tension in that? The irony, the hyloxies ended up being pretty black and white. And it's like, yeah, this is the way that you do things. And if you don't like doing these things, then the holocacy doesn't work for you. And what we realized was that you needed, you can't have the system that you designed your company has to adapt and it has to be situational for the team, for the people and both on what they want in their role but also in their ability. So there's this notion of situational leadership where you flex up and down your level of control based on the ability for the team. Haloxi didn't have that. So it's just very, it felt very chaotic. And

then as we were scaling the company, you know, we're doubling every year. It just took a lot of time to onboard people and teach them how to do things. So the rule set got in the way of itself. it was empowering but it was also slow and you can't you may have been able to resolve all the problems with it but we just didn't have the time or the luxury to do it through the formal processes but at one point to Jen my co-founder and I were the people that we moved us off Holocracy to a new a new model which we grew internally but as we were doing that we kind of joke that half the problem was the name Holocracy and then the dogma surrounded it It had this weird life of its own and this belief of what it meant.

And the best word is dogma. And then that meant that that got in the way of the company. So it's not like how do we solve this problem? It's like how do we do this thing in holocry? And then we spend all the time talking about holocry instead of the thing you were trying to solve. So it got in the way of itself. That is so meta. It literally became like a religion.

So every thing you looked at, you were looking through the lens of this Bible or these commandments or this dogma. That's not how problems are solved. I really like what you said there is like things are situational. There might be a team member who is so transcendent at doing something that everybody else gets out of the way and lets them do it in a certain situation. Then there might be other situations which are confounding and new and you want to bring in twice as many people and have 10 times as many ideas, right? Like sometimes you're sending in a sniper team and they're going to take out the target.

Or Osama bin Laden, you're sending in like the seals. Other times you might need to. to be like, this is diplomacy time, or maybe we're going to take an economic approach to solving this problem with the Taliban. I'm sorry, I'm just watching the season of Homeland. But, you know, there's different approaches. Right. And it flexes even with an individual. So you have a high performer who is generally, you delegate like problems to them and they just run with it. Maybe they're going through a stressful period or they're returning from like paternity leave or something like that. And then you give them much smaller tasks during that period while they're ramping back up.

up. So that's the power of good leadership is that you come up with the right method of management or right method of leadership in the moment for the right situation, the right person. And Locke's just very dogmatic. Yeah, that's the art of it. It's like you might have a high performer, but they're coming back from an injury. And you say, I know that you're a starter. I know you're Kevin Durant. We want you to come off the bench. We want you to play 20 minutes. We want to see what's going on with that Achilles heel. We just want you to take five or 10 shots. You don't need to like dunk the ball. Let's just get you into some spot-up three-point shooting, get you warmed up, and then we'll, you know, slowly increase you back to whatever speed. But the problem

is sometimes people are like, they just rush people back and they just get re-injured or they're not ready for it, right? And exactly, yeah. That's the job of a great manager. Who's the best manager alive today in business? Anybody you look to or any historical person you look to based on their bio, obviously you didn't work for everybody, but just from an outreach. perspective you look at and say, you know, that's a gold standard right there. That's, that's somebody who does a really great job. Yeah, I don't know off the top of my head. I think it's such a difficult question because the external perspective of people can be so different to the perspective of the people who, you know, report to them or work for them. So I hazard to name a

person, unfortunately, just maybe a cop out. But I think, I think often, I've been surprised many times where there's been someone who I thought must be the best person to work for. And then I've heard stories about actually how it's really terrible and vice versa, where someone who on the surface seems, you know, relatively uninspirational and potentially, you know, not very motivating is like one of the best people that they've ever worked for. It really is fascinating, isn't it? And I think it also has to do with the stage of life. If you look at somebody like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, you know, there were these

stories of them being terrors in the beginning of their lives, and then there are these stories of them being exceptional later in their lives to be human to the point of, you know, just saint-like. You know, there's a great moment in the Bob Iger book where Bob Iger's book where he's buying Pixar for Disney and Steve Jobs takes him on the side and says, listen, I got to tell you, I know we're about to announce, but you can back out if you want. I'm my cancer's back. And I know I'm a big part of this. I'm going to be your biggest shareholder.

And I understand if you don't want to buy this knowing that I may not be here in six months. And you're like, oh my God. And like, did you read it yet? Bob Eiger's book. I haven't read it. No. It's a great lesson and great book. I mean, he really has to go through this like incredible moment of like, oh my God.

Steve Jobs is not going to be here and I'm going to buy this company. I might have bought this knowing Steve Jobs is going to die. And then I can't tell the world he's going to die quickly in all likely. in all likelihood. And that's material information or is it not material? And then how do I process that even? It's a really amazing human moment.

Yeah. One thing that you said, though, there are these theories of adult cognitive development and that as you, it's mostly tied to age, but it's not perfectly tied to age, it's tied to experience. But the way that your mind makes meaning of the world

evolves throughout your life. It used to be thought of had been fixed. So as you hit these different levels, of cognition, you start thinking more from the system's point of view versus the group or for more egocentric. So you can chart people's biographies through that journey. And that's a lens to view, say, like, jobs journey on. Yeah, it's interesting that it's chronologically. I also think there's milestones that affect people. So I watch when people make, you know, a large amount of money in that or have a large

amount of demonstrable success and they don't feel like their failure is imminent, which, you know, like, there were moments where it looked like Twitter was going to fail. Like, they couldn't even keep the servers up. And so for somebody, just take Ev, a mutual friend of ours. Like, I didn't, I don't work for, did never work with Ev, but I get the, I get the sense that the level of safety and freedom he has, having had the great success of Twitter and then previously, you know, the moderate success of blogger gave him a freedom with medium that he can really, you know, take his time. and he's not under some existential threat to be, you know, like maybe somebody like, you know, who's under the pressure right now, like the Airbnb founders might be right now at this very moment.

Yeah, totally. Yeah, it relates to, I think Maslow, again, like 60s old research, but again, it has relevance today. And his pyramid isn't as meant to be as dogmatic as we currently believe it to be as much more like a fluid set of stages that you progress to and, and can go up and down dynamically. But yeah, totally. If you have all your material needs taken care of, that frees you up to take more

risks. And then you also have like emotional needs and, you know, other needs. But if you can start checking those things off, then, yeah, it frees you up to do things that otherwise would hold you back. Amazing. This has been a great hour with Daniel Pupias. Hey, Daniel, I don't know if my producer asked you, but I would love it if you would do in the founder Slack, this week in Seravs.com Slack and AMA, maybe if you could carve out

45 minutes to talk about range. So there you have it, folks. We've got our third AMA coming soon if you're listening to this. Join the Slack group this week in startups.com slash Slack. It's free. All we ask is that you be a good human, consider it a dinner party. Like you got invited to a kick-ass dinner party and you want to get invited back. Just have conversations.

Don't go to there to market. Don't go to there to spam. Don't go to there to fill the top of your funnel. Like the people dropping e-books and cigarette sensation products. Go in there and just have a normal conversation about what you're going through. be a human and superhuman, Daniel will be there as well, doing an AMA.

Everybody go check out range.co. And are you hiring now or are you just building? Yeah, we're looking for a couple of engineers, but mostly just keeping it lean. Will you consider a remote engineer at this point, or do they have to be in your den? No, we've always decided, designed their companies being remote friendly.

We have people who like working in the same office, so we did have an office, we shut it down. But yeah, permanently? Well, we think, I think there's going to be shelter in place on and off for quite a while. So we were saving the expense and we'll reestablish an HQ if and when. Well, let's assume it is coming back. I'm curious how you think about it as the founder's CEO. Do you want to have an office again?

I think we have people on the team who like, they just like working in an office. They like having that space and then they like the interactions. I think it doesn't become a requirement for. work, like even previously, on any given day, only half the team would be in the office. People would work from coffee shops or remotely. So it's more of a meeting place, a formal meeting place than like an office. So we will have one eventually. I just don't know if that's three months, six months or like 18 months. I'm thinking of a new thing. I'm thinking of having a hybrid for the rest of the year because we're going to be coming back where we do Tuesday, Wednesday,

Thursday, really intense in the office. And then Monday, Friday, you work from home and to be less intense, but we do this like really intense group work over three days. What do you think of that? I think there's some really interesting hybrid solutions in the future. I imagine an office where you have maybe some desks for people who want to work in the office the whole time. Then you have some temporary areas where you have kind of like these transient people who come through the office. And then you have remote friendly collaboration areas. So I think the future of work is actually really interesting and it's kind of accelerated over the last few months. And I'm pretty excited about where we end off. Me too. All right, with that, I'll thank you for coming on the pod and I'll see you in the

AMA. And to everybody out there dealing with this pandemic, nobody has the answers. Nobody has all the answers, right? We're learning. We're getting through it together. Be kind to each other. Make a little bit of space for debate, especially when we try to figure out going back. Should we do it? Should we not? Everybody is under stress. The people who are, you know, delivering packages all the way up to the CEOs, the investors, politicians, man, this is trying for everybody to try to sort this out. It's psychologically brutal for everybody. Just make a little space.

Just make a little space and check in on the people you love because people might be putting up a good front, but I can tell you, people are hurting, even if they're, you know, powerful people or they seem otherwise successful. This is having a psychological impact on everybody. So just a little bit of space for everybody, a little bit of kindness, I think, and a little bit of self-care.

Okay, everybody, take care of yourselves. We'll see you next time. in this week's startups