Freckle: A Reflection of the First Five Years of Freckle

5min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Freckle started out as a san francisco only base team, and in the office five days a week. Now freckle has this culture that is fully globally remote and has no meetings. And so we've emphasize that everyone gets to make their own decisions. Because they have all the contexts they need for success. If you hire people who are going to be able to make those decisions, then that change is inevitable.

Today’s episode is with Sidharth Kakkar, founder and CEO of Subscript, a subscription intelligence platform that empowers B2B SaaS leaders to better understand their revenue. (Read more about the company in this Techcrunch article.)

Previously, he was the founder, CEO of Freckle, an education platform that grew to serve 10 million students and was acquired by Renaissance Learning in 2019. As a repeat founder, Sidharth picked up a ton of valuable lessons, particularly when it comes to company culture and management.

Right from the start, he knew he wanted to build Subscript to be global, distributed, and asynchronous. That’s why there are no internal company meetings. Everyone also operates autonomously, deciding what to work on for themselves.

We dive into both the philosophy behind this unique approach and the nitty gritty details of how exactly it works in practice. Here’s a preview:

How to share company updates asynchronously every week.
Advice on how to approach goal-setting and performance feedback, while minimizing micromanagement.
Tips for improving transparency and documentation, plus details on Subscript’s running product/market fit journal.
Thoughts on how to assess asynchronous communication skills when hiring.
How this culture impacts a founder’s role and schedule.

There’s tons of food for thought in here, whether you’re a founder thinking about shaping your company culture, or a manager looking for some fresh ideas.

You can follow Sidharth on Twitter at @sikakkar. You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @brettberson.