This Week in Startups - E1060 AMA: Range CEO & Co-Founder Dan Pupius answers questions from founders: meeting & collaborating with Evan Williams, divvying up time while building a remote team, product development advice, benefits of co-founders & more

Episode Date: May 14, 2020

Range CEO & Co-Founder Dan Pupius answers questions from founders: meeting & collaborating with Evan Williams, divvying up time while building a remote team, product development advice, benefits of co-founders & more Join the TWiST Slack: https://launchevents.typeform.com/to/kLq5Bi Check out Range: https://www.range.co/ Questions: 0:50 Laura: Interested in learning more about what made you want to build a company that focused on remote work? Do you personally find it challenging not to be in the same physical space as your team/the companies you work for? 2:46 Knyck: What advice would you give around developing and sticking to a product development roadmap as a first-time founder? What’s a good way to establish and calibrate sprint lengths when looking at various aspects of the build? 5:48 Henry: What are best practices around building a tight mission-driven culture when working remotely given people are not interacting face to face physically on a daily basis and focus may be impaired? 8:10 Kevin: Have you received any downstream investor interest since the start of mass quarantine across the US? Do investors see this as an opportunity? 8:57 Ciara: Can you share a little about where you want to be in 18-24 months with Range? How are you planning on scaling and what does your product roadmap look like? 10:51 Nick/Presh: How did you meet Evan Williams, what’s the story of you leaving Google for Medium, and what are some amazing insights/lessons you learned from working with him? What makes him stand out as a founder? 13:41 James: Really like the use of daily check-ins and achievement tracking within Range to keep people on track. How can we encourage these actions in important areas outside of work, where people aren't directly incentivized/forced to do so (fitness, eating, learning)? 15:52 Charles: What do you look for in a co-founder and what advice would you give to founders looking for one? Do they even need to? Also, Marmite, love it or hate it? 18:23 Lizette: What should self-funded startups be thinking about right now and 24-36 months out? 20:45 Sean: Any tips on joining a (small) tech team as a new leader? Especially fully remote? 23:24 Amanda: How did Google change in the 7 years you were there in terms of culture and product roadmap? What was it like when you joined and when you left? 25:41 Ian: How has being an Industrial designer and software developer given you insights for Range and remote working? Are you a leader or a co-founder, can you be both. 28:58 Ian: What are people expecting from a question about "culture", what are they expecting others to give them. For me, If you don't know what culture you want, you simply don't know what you want or where you are going. 32:20 Sanford: How do you split up your day starting a remote company? Do you have days when you do certain work? 34:36 Jason: What do we lose by being remote and how do we get it back if we stay remote? 37:25 Nick: You said you met Evan Williams at The Grove, what’s your go-to meal? (My favorite breakfast burrito in SF)

Today, on This Week in Startups, we haven't Ask Me Anything featuring Ranged CEO and co-founder Dan Pupias. This AMA was recorded live in our Twist Slack channel. To participate in weekly AMAs and discuss all aspects of startup life with Jason and our community of 25,000 founders, join us at this weekin startups.com slash slack. This episode is brought to you. you ad-free thanks to our partners, Dell, Silicon Valley Bank, and Clavio. Well, hi, everyone. I'm happy to be here. My name's Dan Pupais, CEO and co-founder of range. In past lives, I worked at Google and Medium, I'm excited to answer some of the questions.

So I guess I'll just jump straight in. So Laura asks, interested in learning more about what made you want to build a company that focused on remote work. Do you find it personally challenging not to be in the same physical space, with your team and the companies you work for. So we actually didn't start range to be remote first or a remote work company. We were mostly interested in making work better for everyone, and we did a lot of research

into some of the challenges of organizations face as they scale. And what we noticed was that remote companies are generally more intentional about how they set up their processes, and they also, the problems that remote companies face, They're essentially amplified versions of the problems that you face in person. So what that meant was that as we started solving some of these problems for teams and how they communicate and collaborate, it resonated most with remote companies. So our early customer base was around 80% distributed.

They were in multiple time zones. And then I think we did predict the advent of remote work becoming more popular. And then obviously the COVID situation has really pushed that to the forefront and everyone's been accelerated into that that mode of operation. And then from a personal point of view around the not being in the same physical space, I actually don't find it challenging. I do like working in an office. I like having a desk. I like having a mini kitchen and I like randomly bumping into people. But some of my best collaborative moments have been with people not in the same office of me.

So back on when I was in Gmail chat, I used to joke that I would collaborate with Michael, who was in Seattle more effectively than people who are outside my office. So I actually think that the physical distance and the location isn't a factor, it's other factors. And being remote can amplify collaboration issues. All right, so next question from Nick. What advice would you give around developing and sticking to a product development roadmap as a first-time founder? What's a good way to establish and calibrate sprint lengths when looking at various aspects of the build? So one of my favorite quotes, which my team get really bored of me, quoting is, planning is everything, the plan is nothing.

So what that means is the act of planning is very useful, because it's a way of orienting yourself and figuring out which direction you should go. But once things are in motion, the plan can be a liability. So what I would say is like sticking to a roadmap shouldn't necessarily be the goal. Solving customer problems is the goal. And you work out a roadmap which is a hypothesis for how you solve those customer needs and getting alignment with the team. But especially with an early stage company, you have to be very agile and flexible about that roadmap. So you need to be able to take in your information and adapt the roadmap as necessary.

So I would generally write it down. You do these planning exercises, share it with a team, write it in the dark, have a manifesto, like whatever works for your team, and then review regularly is a starting point. It's pretty straightforward. In terms of calibrating sprint lengths, I think one important thing to think about here is that there's two cycles that don't necessarily need to be combined. So there's these cadences of communication, which is as a team, how do you, come together, communicate, get aligned and align on the North Star.

And then the second cadence is a cadence of work, which is how do you do project planning and how do you do units of work? So in some companies, it's possible to have those be aligned. You might do a two weeks sprint on work and a two week. And then you align the work sprint with your communication cadence. But in other companies, especially as you grow, different work streams have different natural cadences. So it might not make sense for an infrastructure team,

to do something every two weeks, but the R&D team probably is operating on like one-week cycles or even shorter. But you still need to communicate across the company. So I would start with actually defining the cadence of communication, which is when do you start planning? So at range, we do Monday morning briefing and we have two weeks for ends. We plan work for two weeks and then we have a retro at the end or it's the whole company. I imagine that two weeks will stay constant.

for quite some time, but teams may start planning work in like two or three cycles, as we call them. And then I think it's just being adaptive, like figure out how you're sensing into the state of the team, how are you being productive, how are projects being completed, and then just being okay, dialing that up and down. Maybe you actually don't want to do two-week cycles for a while and you want to switch to six weeks. That's totally fine, but you just have to be intentional about it. Henry asks, what are best practices around building a tight mission-driven culture when working remotely, given people and not interacting face-to-face physically on a daily basis and focus may be impaired? Well, I think there's two realities, right? There's the reality of are you building

a remote company and setting out from the start to do that or have you been thrown into it? So if you are building a remote company from scratch, then I think a lot of this comes down to hiring and onboarding and making sure that you're attracting people who understand the problems you're trying to solve, who resonate with the mission and are intrinsically motivated by that. Unfortunately, a lot of people are now in this remote work situation where they haven't necessarily had to be able to build that foundation, so we're having to rapidly redirect teams. So I think some tactics here are to just think about these sort of rituals and like rhythms and it goes back to the cadence of communication.

You have to complete, have this drumby where you're reinforcing why you're doing what you're doing and why it's important. And that has to ladder through the company. So there's always that I'm not sure if it's real, but someone asking a machinist to test a SpaceX company about what this Balt is for and this Balt is to get a man to Mars. And it was just that they understood that working on the small feature in a factory contributed to a big space program that would eventually get someone to Mars. I don't know if that's a prockful or real, but it gives you kind of an idea. It doesn't matter if you're a DevOps engineer, product engineer, someone working on the IT or people operations, everyone should understand how their work ladders up to the

company goal. And that can be done a couple of ways. Some people use OKRs and objectives, and then they have the objectives higher ladder up. You could give teams charters. So you have say the people ops teams charter might be to build like build the best company or build a world-class team, but it could also be tied to the company the company's mission. So I think it's just about having that drumbeat of reinforcing why you're doing what you're doing. Do it at the briefing, doing it recaps, just keep keep repeating yourself. Kevin, have you received any downstream investor interest since the start of mass quarantine across the US? Do investors see this as an opportunity?

Yes. I'm not sure how much I want to share here, but definitely I think there was, I think there's a lot of investors who are healthily skeptical of productivity and team software, especially in the HR space, and now they're suddenly realizing that there's a big opportunity here and the world has changed and they're now trying to understand the market. So definitely had a lot of people doing outreach. So definitely an opportunity. It's accelerating a lot of trends that we already saw in the workplace. And if you think about what the operating system for work looks like in five, 10 years, it looks very different to the stack today.

Like, we need a new stack to build companies on top of Sierra. That's how you pronounce it. Can you share a little about where you want to be in 18 to 24 months with range? How are you planning on scaling and what does your product roadmap look like? So I think ultimately, my goal at Ranges to help teams be more successful. So in 18 to 24 months, I'd love for our customers to look back and say, yes, Range really helps our teams navigate this really difficult time. Companies going through a lot of transitions.

It's really difficult. And I do think that Range can help them navigate that and build these foundations for good teamwork. So I'd love for people to be able to say that. That'd be a really good place to be. On the product side, currently we've been focusing on the team as the unit of work. And it works pretty well for teams as a way of keep staying connected and knowing what's happening. What we're looking for over the next year or so is to deepen value for the individual,

for the team, then for the organization. So on the individual level, we already integrate with all your tools. So I'm pretty excited about some of the stuff we're doing around attachments and integrations to really nail your personal workflow. So C range as a hub where all your all your work tools funnel into this place and it just makes it much easier to To plan and structure your day on the team point on the team value We're looking at how we can help support these cadences these rituals and these rhythms So when we look at that most high-performing teams they have these really strong Rhythms of the work so we see an opportunity for range to help build

that cadence for different teams so each team can find their own groove and integrate into different different moments of collaboration. Then the organizational layer, we're starting to collect some really interesting data across these tools and these updates and how can we provide intelligence and insights around the health and the functioning of the company. So individual team organizational value, essentially. Nick Presh, how did you meet Evan Williams? What's the story of you leaving Google for Medium? And what are some amazing insights and lessons you learned from working with him? What makes him stand out as a founder? So I was looking around for what to do after leaving Google. I decided to leave.

And a friend of mine who had previously worked on Blogger with Ev introduced us. And I didn't actually know Ev was doing anything post Twitter and agreed to meet him. And I met him at the Grove on Mission Street, Mission and Third. wearing a suit and that might not sound unusual but he's a pretty casual guy in general. And the first thing he says was like, I don't normally wear suits. I was just meeting Obama. So it's like this super casual like drop of meeting. I guess at that point it was like pre-president Obama. And we just started talking about what he wanted to do and what company he wanted to build. And it was just really interesting, really exciting. At that point, it was obvious cooperation.

So it wasn't actually medium. Medium was just a word on a whiteboard that him and business. written up as one of the products we were exploring. So when I joined there, there was a V1 of Medium. And then I started working on the V2 of Medium, like pretty much straight away. And then that became the whole focus of the company. So I think what amazing insights. I think Ev really taught me the power of storytelling. It's obviously it's like deeply ingrained into the medium culture and the platform and the product.

But it's also a great way of building alignment and getting people to be really loyal and mission focused. I think Medium has some of the most thoughtful, interesting people on the team. And even the alumni community is very aligned and close-knit. And I think a lot of that is to do with the kind of the cultural storytelling and the background to the mission. The other story or other lesson I learned from him was around what it means to go with your gut. And so you often have the sort of sense of discomfort that something's not quite right.

And that's like your gut telling you that something needs to be looked at. And I think what I learned from Evers, it wasn't about being impulsive and unintentional. It was about using that as a sensing signal. So you sense into things that your subconscious is aware that your conscious isn't aware of, but you don't have to go explore it. So you have to then go explore what your gut is telling you.

So it's kind of like an integration of the intentional and the unintentional subconscious. That was really cool. What makes him stand out as a founder, I mean, he's done it over and over, lots of experience, and very determined. James, really like the use of daily check-ins. and achievement tracking within range to keep people on track. How can we encourage these actions in important areas outside of work where people aren't directly incentivized for us to do so?

So one of the things we looked at with Range was how to encourage a behavior that people may intellectually know is valuable, but doesn't stick. So that's like essentially what habit is. A habit is something that you do without having to think about it. So even the daily check-in or work planning is something that everyone knows, makes them more productive. So I think HBR have a study on just checking in on what you're going to do with the day is makes you 15% more productive, something like that.

But a lot of people don't take that time at the beginning of the day because they just get caught up in the rush of work. So we look at these behavior loops. And generally when you think of a behavior loop, there's a cue, something that triggers the behavior, the thing that you actually want to happen, and then you have to have some form of reward, and that reward reinforces the behavior. So for range, we looked into that habit loop and we actually have multiple overlaying habit loops around the behavior.

So multiple cues and multiple essentially that rewards. So when you're looking at other areas, you have to think about similar things. So with fitness, what is the cue to exercise and what is a cue that will be motivating? As someone who exercises fairly regularly, a notification is not necessarily going to be the right cue to make. me want to go out on a run. But perhaps there's these other signals that you could provide as a cue, like my watch telling me that I'm now unproductive instead of productive. And then what is the reward on the other side? And I think what we've learned from social media and also some of the principles we've had to range is that there's a lot of value in social accountability in terms of

the reward loop. So I think if you look at Strava and some of these social meditation apps, Like having that social accountability is a great way of having, of reinforcing that behavior loop. And then once it's habitual, it's, it's a habit, so it's easy to continue. Charles, what do you look for in a co-founder and what advice would you give to founders looking for one? Do they need to also, do they need to? Oh, I guess do they need to find a founder? And also, Marmite love it or hate it. I'll start with the Marmite one.

This is easy. I hate it. Also hate Veggimite for Australians. So in the co-founder, I think when we're starting range, it was really important to have a good spread of both skills and abilities and behaviors. I think Braden, Jen, and I really complement each other really nicely there. There's very little overlap in our core disciplines. Braden's a designer. Jen comes from a people up's background. And then from a sort of like behavioral perspective point of view, we all bring different perspectives to the table.

So that's been really great. I think it could be pretty tricky if the founding team all comes from a similar background with similar focuses and similar skills. I think that will make you a bit blinkered and a bit blind to opportunities. So that's one thing is making sure that you have those perspectives. And then looking for a foundation of trust, you will have conflict and conflict is good if you can handle it and process it effectively. So I think what often happens is founding teams,

they try and avoid that conflict, and that creates this kind of seed of doubt and a seed of lack of commitment to each other and that kind of eventually blow up into something, and it erodes the trust over time. So I worked with Braden in 2006, way back before we and then we went out separate ways for a few years and Jen and I worked a medium together so we both had a track record of collaborating and working together

which made it made us feel like it would be a good foundation and do you even need a co-founder I personally wouldn't want to do this on my own it's really really difficult and being able to lean on other people if you're having a bad week or a bad month someone else on the founding team can step up and take a bit of the slack so being able to ebb and flow between the three of us has been really valuable It's amazing when all three of us are firing on the full capacity all the time, but, you know, in the current climate with impending doom every corner, it's actually really difficult. So having three people has been really, really, really great there. Lizette, what should self-funding startups be thinking about right now and 24 to 36 months out?

Yeah, I think this goes for anyone. We honestly, no one knows what the world is going to look like to three years from now. And it's all reading tea leaves and making predictions. So I think the main thing is to think through various scenarios of what the world might look like and what is your hypothesis for the world and it has to come from you. And that might be based on some very optimistic recoveries or it could be something, you know, more extreme, like, are we going into a 10-year depression and what are the impacts of that on the world? And then you can start kind of like laddering back from those scenarios.

And you don't have to, they have to be true or accurate scenarios. It's just the model for thinking through how that's going to affect both your company, your business, your employees, your customers. and that will help you kind of at least spot some commonalities which you can move forward on. We're just from a like range perspective, we're not even trying to look that far into the future. We are looking into next year, but we're not trying to look too distant. We have we have ideas on the say from the product roadmap and the business roadmap for like first, second, third horizons going out longer than that. But in terms of planning, we don't know if we're going to have an office in January. We shut down our office a month ago, and we do imagine opening office again,

but we don't know if that's going to be January 2021 or January 2022. So that's a decision that we don't even need to think about because there's no way we can get the information to make that decision. What we can look at is the effects on our customer base and the demand for our product and what that looks like. And then we can start building hypotheses around how that's going to play out over the next six, eight, 12 weeks and then maybe going a bit further. I think at this moment, we're in a very complex and potentially even chaotic situation. So it's really having these fast OODA loops, OUDA's, observe, orient, decide, act, and then just being very agile and flexible about how you make decisions and how you change

direction. Any tips on joining a small tech team as a new leader, especially fully remote? A lot of this depends on your background. If you come from a big company and you're a leader there, everything's going to look very different at a small company. And you kind of have to reassess what the role of a leader is and rethink what your day-to-day job looks like. And I think one mistake people often make is that there's kind of like three levels to work.

Can you set the vision? Can you write the playbook and then can you run the playbook? And in a big company, you can get away with, if you're a very senior leader, you can get away with just setting the vision and they're not actually being able to write the playbook because you can delegate that someone else. And what I've seen a bunch is that people come into companies or startups with these great, great backgrounds. And they can set the vision and then they can kind of like help people write the playbook, but then they can't run the playbook. And in a startup, everyone has to be getting their hands dirty and working on the ground. So as a lead, you have to roll up your sleeves and act as an IC. So one way to think about this is you have multiple hats.

So as an IC, you have your IC hat, then you have your lead hat. And what is the lead hat? Is it a coach? Is it a mentor, as a director? In a startup, or a small team, it's much more of a mentor coach role. So essentially your mission and your goal is to set the environment for success. So how are you sensing into the team's needs? How are you helping them navigate the organization or the product needs or the roadmap and

how are you helping them succeed at their goals? And that's the main question you should be asking. And that's the same whether you're in the same office of them or your remote. The difference with remote is how are you doing the sensing? It's much harder to sense into the team when you're not in the office with them. So you have to think about what is your apparatus for sensing into the health and the success of the team. And it goes back to the cadence.

So what is your check-ins? what are the check-ins at the team level, at the individual level, how are you asking questions and reviewing them? We have a blog post around five questions. You can ask yourself at the end of every week as a leader to make sure that work is balanced and effective. So you can check out range.co slash blog for that. But yeah, I think that's straight.

But I think basically you can't be a director on a small team. It's more of a gardener. Like your role as a leader as a gardener. Like you can't force the roses to grow. You can set the conditions for the roses to bloom. And that's like how to think about your role as a leader. Amanda, how did Google change in the seven years you were there in terms of culture and product roadmap? What was it like when you joined and when you left?

Oh, wow. Well, I joined in 2005 and it was around 3,000 people, I think. And then when I left, it was a lot bigger than that. But even at 3,000 people, there were huge areas of Google that I had very little knowledge of. So I worked on Gmail and in the apps world. So I had a fair amount of visibility into say Google Docs and spreadsheets and groups, but not into ads and analytics. So Google already at that point had kind of sharded the company into different focus areas,

which is the only way you can effectively scale is to create these sort of like subdivisions. But then in terms of the culture, I think just, I mean, scale gets more difficult, the more people to coordinate, things get slower. And that definitely took its toll, many layers of management and kind of reorgs happening more frequently. I think there was one year where I had three VPs. And for the most part, that didn't change day to day much, but it definitely changed priorities, which can feel a little bit like a neat, like a, like a, you're getting yanked around.

So I still think Google is a great company. I think it's just inevitably it's grown a lot bigger and that's caused a lot of changes. In terms of the product roadmap, I think it depends on the team. I think that this is another interesting thing about large organizations is that the variance within the company can often be as much or more than the variance between different companies. So a team at Google and a team at Amazon might actually look very similar,

but holistically, Amazon and Google look like completely different companies with completely different value systems. So a team on, say, in the analytics org, Google might be very different than a team in the ads org, or a team working on self-driving cars. And that goes to everything from culture to how they do product planning, to how the leadership works. And that's just something you have to expect. So if you do join a big company or you are a big company, you can navigate the organization to figure out the spot that fits you best. Ian, how is being an industrial designer and software developer giving you insights for range and remote working? Are you a leader or a co-founder?

Can you be both? So I have a master's in industrial design. I wouldn't say, I'm an industrial designer. I was trying to kind of broaden my foundation. I was working in Sheffield in Northern England. So I was working at e-learning and kind of wanted to stretch out into other. other areas. So that's why I did my industrial design degree. And it's definitely gave me a lot of insight into the design process and user think, design thinking and sort of customer analysis. So that's

been really great. It's thinking in building ranges, like how do you approach things from a needs first point of view? So what is the customer need that you're delivering and and, and laddering that back through the whole organization? I wouldn't necessarily say that it's given me any insights into remote working. I did that degree back in the early 2000s, but I do generally think that when you think of an organization, you're designing a product, the organization is the product. And in the same way that you look at customer needs or user needs, what are the needs of your team and your company? And it's a complex problem because there's multiple stakeholders. So what are the needs of individuals on the team, what the needs of managers, like other stakeholders,

and essentially you're building this network of dependent. or in the organization, and you can sit down and map that. And Simon Wardley has done some really interesting work around value chain mapping that you can apply to planning out the organization. So if you're interested in that more from an academic point of view, that's check out Simon Wadley's work. And then are you a leader or a co-founder can be both? I think you can definitely be both. I think everyone is a leader. leading is about having an idea and taking action towards the idea, about influencing other people. So I encourage everyone in an organization to think of themselves as being a leader.

Co-founder is not really a job, it's a title, so co-founder doesn't mean anything. It doesn't tell you anything about what I do or what value I provide. It just means that I was there when the company was incorporated. So you can definitely be both. And then as the company grows, co-founder, it can be consistent. It can be kind of like this moral compass that can anchor the organization, which can be valuable. But I think it can also be harmful because it can imbue authority where authority doesn't necessarily need to be as the company grows. So that's something to be careful about.

So we prefer to talk about what is your role versus what is your title. And the role is a hat that you wear. And the hat can be taken off and given to someone else at different points in time. And as a small company, I do security. IT, I did a vendor assessment today. If we had an office, I'd take the trash out. I updated our address in 20 different SaaS products. There's a lot of work that I do that isn't like CEO work technically, but it's a hat I have to wear in the company. And everyone has to wear multiple hats. So I'm sorry, I think about that. Ian, I'd really like to know what are people

expecting from a question about culture? What are they expecting others to give them? For me, if you don't know what culture you want, you simply don't know what you want or where you're going. So culture, my definition of culture is it's the way, it's the collective behaviors within a group of people. And it's how you interact with each other. It's what you recognize and what you reward. And you definitely can't dictate or direct culture, but you can kind of nurture it and guide it and encourage certain behaviors. So that's when we talk about building culture, that's really what we mean. it's about setting these behaviors and these processes,

about recognizing intentionally what you want to have in your collective group. So I do think that the best companies have very intentional cultures. They think about the values and about the principles of which they operate with each other and how they behave. But it is somewhat of an emergent organism. It goes back to the gardening metaphor. So in terms of the team question,

I'm going to guess that this is around range is culture building questions. So the way we think about the team building questions in ranges that in modern workplaces, whether you're remote or not, there's often not many opportunities to connect on a sort of emotional, emotional level. And what we've learned from all the research is that psychological safety is the endpoint, but what are the precursors to psychological safety? So psychological safety is built on trust.

It's built on belonging, which is built on trust, which is built on emotional vulnerability. And that's being able to be open about yourself, be open about your risks, your fears, and not worry about reprisal or judgment from your team. So what we do in the team-building questions in these icebreakers is essentially encourage a moment of microvulnerability every day.

It's like you show your team something about you. which might seem really silly like what's your favorite food. But it's actually this powerful habit which then makes you more open to the rest of the team. So when you're going into these other collaborative or exercises or doing the rest of your work, you've got that you're slightly one-leveled up. And the important thing for us is also it's integrated into the work stream. So there's this phenomenon where you have these team-building exercises where you go off-site and then you come back to the office and you go back to your work.

and you leave all the team building stuff on the team building offsite and you go back to your old behaviours. So it's very important to integrate these team building moments into the work stream. Otherwise, you essentially have these two separate cultures. You have the culture of socializing outside work, and you have the culture within the office or within the virtual office, which is how you behave to each other on a day-to-day basis. And I think I had realizations around that where I'd be happy hours.

hours of people and like talking and being really happy and then I'd get kind of frustrated with them over a code of view or a doc and probably treated them not super kindly and fairly so we need to remind each other that you know we're human we're on the same side we have a common goal and that has to be deeply integrated into all the work processes Sanford how do you split up your day starting a remote company do you have days when you do certain work I think this is I'll talk abstractly about this to begin with rather than just me I think this depends on your energy levels and how you like to work.

And I've coached people through this exercise. And there's essentially two extremes, which as a program, a nerd, I call like vertical or horizontal sharding. But what I mean by that is that some people prefer to have a day of focus time. So if you're doing a day on coding, you say Wednesday is my coding day, and I'm just going to block that out and do coding. Other people prefer to have horizontal blocks of time. So in the morning, they do some,

coding work in the afternoon they may do investor meetings or or or like one-on-ones whatever but it's essentially breaking down your day and I think it depends on your energy levels how introverted extroverted you are and just the nature of the work at any given moment for me I I follow much more of a GTD methodology that gets things done and by that I mean if something is going to take me less than minutes I will just do it to get it off my plane out of my mind. So that might make it seem like I'm interrupt driven, but really what it means is I don't want to store things in my mental cognitive space for longer than necessary.

So I do sketch out my day in the morning. I use range, of course, to sketch out my day. It has meetings, I have coding tasks that want to get done. But then through the day, I essentially pull things off that list in a pretty random way based on how inspired I'm feeling or how most of the things. motivated I'm feeling to do different types of work. And then, you know, I set myself deadlines if necessary. But I think one thing about starting any type of company, whether it be remote or not, is that

there's just a lot to do and a lot is urgent. And that means that you may lay plans and have grand schemes for what you're going to do for over a two-week basis. But then on like Tuesday, everything goes to shit. And then you have to reassess that. So you just have to get good rolling with the punches and enjoy the roller coaster. Jason asks, what do we lose by being remote and how do we get back if we stay remote? So the biggest thing you lose by going remote is these chaotic interactions that happen in the workplace.

So if you've looked at Pixar and what they did there when they were designing the offices, is they designed the offices to create these random chaotic interactions in common spaces. So the architected where the offices and the toilets were and where the kitchens were, so people would run into each other. And those interactions are both are used for transmitting information and sharing data, but also renewing belonging cues. And the belonging cues is, again, what goes back to psychological safety and trust. So when you don't have those common spaces and those common interactions,

you lose a lot of those informal ad hoc interactions, which actually build the fabric and the foundation for healthy teamwork. So when we go remote, you have to think very intentionally about how you build those, that fabric. And it's more difficult, but it can actually be, if done well, can be more effective and also more inclusive, which is an unexpected benefit of some of these remote operations. So again, it goes back to the cadence. and charting out your week or your weeks or your month. And thinking about the interactions that the team has.

And some of these interactions have to be about work, about information, like what information you're sharing, how you're sharing context, how you're making decisions. Some of it is about building connections. So how do you remind each other that you're all humans and that you're all, you all actually like each other? And the way we've structured that week is we, like I said, we start the week with a briefing. It's in all hands.

We have an agenda that we run through every week. Everyone does a check-in where they get to say how their weekend was and how they showed up. We review objectives and we get aligned on the week. We talk about any big successes. And then we move into our team meetings. And the team meeting is an opportunity for the teams to kind of like renew their belonging in alignment. And then throughout the week we spinkle kind of social activities. So virtual happy hours or we're doing kind of like team building games.

But you can't do just those things. Like if you do just the virtual happy hours and just the team games, it's not integrated into the work. And then it kind of feels sterile and it feels separate. So you have to think about every meeting or every opportunity, how are you addressing the cultural needs, the information needs and the alignment needs. It's difficult. But if you look at companies like Zapier or Envision. And they've done a really great job at building that foundation. You said to you met Evan Williams at the Grove.

What's your go-to meal? My favorite breakfast brewers, SF. Probably one of the egg dishes, I guess. I don't have a very good memory for food. It's very utilitarian. It's calories. Also happy to follow up on Twitter or in the Twist Slack group if anyone wants to hit me up with questions.

I'm happy to talk about this. I'm a complete nerd about organizational and management stuff. Thanks for listening to Dan Pupias has asked me anything. If you'd like to participate in weekly AMAs and discuss all aspects of startup life with Jason and our community of 25,000 founders, join us at this week in startups.com slash slack. Thanks again to Dell, Silicon Valley Bank, and Clavio for making this possible. Thank you.