Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. Are companies setting up their managers for success? What are BICEPS? How do you assemble your colleagues like a management Voltron? Lara Hogan is the founder of Wherewithall, a firm that specializes in management and leadership training — a company that Automattic has worked with in the past. She’s the author of Resilient Management, a must-read for anyone who is a manager, wants to become one, or generally just wants to learn how to be a better teammate. Lara spent a decade growing emerging leaders as the VP of Engineering at Kickstarter and an Engineering Director at Etsy. Related links: Management Voltron Bingo Card Core Needs: BICEPS (Paloma Medina) @Lara_Hogan on Twitter Full episode transcript is below. MATT  MULLENWEG:  Hello everybody, this  is Matt Mullenweg with the Distributed Podcast. I cannot think of another time in my entire work career when we’ve been so faced with so much dramatic change in so little time. How we come together, how we listen to each other, and even how we understand ourselves can define the future of our companies right now in this pivotal time. What does it mean to be a good manager or leader in this moment? Today we’re going to chat with Lara Hogan, she is the founder of Wherewithall, a firm which specializes in management and leadership training and that Automattic has worked with in the past. She is also the author of a book called Resilient Management, which is a must-read for anyone who is a manager, wants to become one or generally just wants to learn how to be a better teammate. She spent a decade growing emerging leaders as the VP of engineering at Kickstarter and an engineering director at Etsy, both companies known for their excellent engineering and execution. So thank you so much for being here. LARA HOGAN:  Thank you so much, what a lovely introduction. MATT:  We’ll make it easy with a one-sentence question. What’s the secret to being a good manager? LARA: [laughs] Oh, this is going to be such an annoying answer of mine, but it’s listening. It’s so obvious to me how this all boils down to how we as humans are not really trained to listen. We are trained to share our knowledge, we are trained often to teach, we are trained to set direction, but we are so rarely trained to listen and that seems to be the crux of most things. MATT:  How did you learn that? LARA:  I’m going to say the hard way by… [laughs] by not listening. I think that especially in engineering land so much of the value is placed on the information that we can provide to others, what we can build, what we can create, again what we can teach. And the act of listening is not really I’m going to say valued in an obvious way. So for me, when I became a leader or a manager, I just kind of assumed that everybody was functioning the same way that I was, needed the same things, valued the same things, liked the same kind of feedback or recognition. And I’m going to say I learned the hard way that that is not the case. We are all pretty unique and special. MATT:  How would you describe how you like feedback and communication and everything? LARA:  I have started to hone how I ask for feedback in terms of after I give a workshop or a talk. I much prefer for people to read it first and digest it before I talk about it. I was a public speaker before I was a coach or a trainer, just giving talks. And I found especially at lots of tech conferences I was receiving a lot of unsolicited feedback, a lot of which was gendered, and it was really hard to be able to distinguish the stuff that was really valuable from the stuff that was this one person’s opinion and perspective and not actually valuable to me getting better as a public speaker. And I started to realize if I could read it first and digest it first I wouldn’t get so amygdala-hijacked, my fight-or-flight mode wouldn’t kick in. So now these days I always try to ask for feedback written first, that way I can digest it and then talk about it afterwards. Because still, digesting it with somebody is also equally important. But for me I need my prefrontal cortex, the rational, logical part of my brain to be online before I can really have a healthy conversation about feedback. MATT: One of my favorite things about distributed work is how the asynchronous nature allows for you to catch that amygdala hijack. LARA:  Yeah, yeah. It’s funny though, a lot of people think that when you’re distributed you can’t notice it as much in the other person. You can’t notice when someone is amygdala hijacked. And I don’t think that’s true at all. MATT:  You don’t even notice it. LARA:  You don’t notice it if you’re not listening, I guess I’ll put it that way. But if you’re watching for it, if you’re sensitive to this other person’s body language or voice, if you’re on over video, or obviously if they’re on the phone with you, if you can only hear their voice, you can still tell if someone is not themselves. And via text, when someone’s text-based communication changes from their normal pattern, either more long-winded if they are more terse usually or more terse if they are long-winded usually, these are all… If you’re looking for it, if you’re paying attention to it, it’s so easy to tell, I think. I don’t know. How has it been in your experience? MATT:  That’s very interesting that you mention people becoming more long-winded. In my experience you can pick up clues for sure in how people are showing up or their responsiveness or the timing. There is lots of metadata in how we communicate that and we can have clues, but I don’t know if it’s a perfect signal the same way that reading someone’s face might be. LARA:  Totally. MATT:  Not that that’s a perfect signal but maybe it feels better. LARA:  Yes it feels like we can get more data usually when we have the extra sensory experience, absolutely. MATT:  And we’re wired to pick up on lots of those things, even if subconsciously around physical presence that we might not get from text. LARA: Totally. MATT:  That’s why, yes, text is definitely I think one of the superpowers but also one of the weaknesses of distributed organizations, or at least ours.  You mentioned listening, do you mean that for listening to others or listening to yourself and what is the relationship there? LARA:  When you asked the question, I was talking about listening to others but I think when it comes to the feedback question I needed to get to know myself first before I could be able to direct others and how I would much prefer to receive feedback. One thing that I’ve learned is that I’m really bad at listening to my own body. I have a chronic illness and it flares up whenever I’m stressed out, which I learned when I was in my early twenties was a thing, and until then I just didn’t pay attention at all to what my body was telling me. MATT: Wow. LARA:  You know? So it’s one of those things that once you start to realize that you need to pay attention to those extra signals, you start to pick it up elsewhere in the world too. Like about the long-winded thing, I can tell when someone is over explaining when they’re normally pretty succinct, I’m like, oh, something is going on for this person.  There’s these five common forms of resistance in humans that — again it’s not a perfect system but it’s a nice framework to think about. If we notice one of these and it’s unusual in the person that we’re talking to, one of these five forms of resistance, it’s pretty likely that their amygdala has been hijacked. Again, that lizard brain, that fight-or-flight response has kicked in and they are all about fighting, verbally fighting, questioning, or doubting, like playing devil’s advocate, avoidance behavior, just being really checked out, looking for an escape route, trying to leave the team or leave the project, leave the company. Or, my personal favorite, which is bonding, which is when you go and try to talk to other people to either process, verbally process what you’re feeling, or just try to find comrades who might agree with you on it. But once you start to pick up on these five common forms of resistance you start to see it everywhere. MATT:  Is there a fun acronym for remembering those? LARA:  I wish, I really wish. This is the longest one it took me to memorize just because I haven’t found a good acronym yet. [laughs] MATT:  You have a book called Resilient Management, which is a fantastic guide to understanding management as a practice. LARA:  Thank you. MATT:  So many people get promoted into management as a next step in their career or whatever feels like an upgrade, but they are not always given a playbook. LARA:  No. MATT:  Maybe there isn’t even a playbook for how to do that. What should organizations do when they promote people to set them up for success? LARA:  Even that word promotion is so unique to organizations. Some organizations do view it and treat it like a promotion, like you’ve now got this new level of responsibility and power and title and then that’s true. Some organizations say that but then there actually isn’t that much of a change in power, responsibility and title. And others treat it more like it’s a role change, which is actually my preferred way of thinking about it just because these skills don’t come naturally to most folks, just like any discipline. So for me I think a lot about it as this is a new rule with a new set of skills, a new set of responsibilities, often more power, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a level up from what you were doing before. It just means that there is a new heaviness than what you were doing before. So I like to think about it in terms of okay, what are the skills that someone might need to be successful at this new kind of role that they haven’t really done before. MATT: Yes, we’ve tried to decouple some of that by when someone starts managing people they don’t get a compensation change. LARA:  Yes. MATT:  And vice versa if they ever want to stop that wouldn’t be a downgrade. But yes, I did use the word promotion. [laughter] So you mentioned that there’s skills needed. LARA:  Yes. MATT: In your book you had something that did have a cool acronym called the BICEPS model? LARA:  Yes, I love talking about this, thank you so much for bringing it up. MATT:  Let’s dive in. LARA:  It’s funny, I also… Right now we’re in quaran-times and I talk about the BICEPS model more now than I ever have done before. So this acronym, BICEPS, was coined by Paloma Medina. And she helped us come up with this handy acronym so that we could easily remember what are the six core needs that humans have at work. And I think that managers are not the only ones that need to pay attention to these things because all humans have these six core needs in different amounts. So I’ll really quickly run through the acronym. The B stands for belonging. So it’s how do we belong to a group? Any time we feel othered or left behind this core need is going to feel threatened. And just like all of the six core needs, this comes from evolution. We needed to belong to a group in order to survive, so any time we feel like oh, everybody’s going out to lunch without me, that’s your amygdala trying to keep you safe. So just keep that in mind, even though a lot of these might feel very like non-events, our amygdala… they are not trivial to our amygdala. The I is for improvement and progress. We need to feel some kind of forward motion in our work or in our careers, in our life. We need to see change and improvement in the things that matter to us. Any time things feel stagnant or it doesn’t feel like we’re learning, those core needs might feel threatened. The C stands for choice, which is effectively autonomy. This is a funny one where we all have a different amount of choice that feels comfortable. Paloma, who coined this acronym, she needs like 98 percent choice in her work-life but that would stress me out so much. I need a solid 80 percent. We are all different. And we need just the right amount, not too much or not too little. E stands for equality and fairness. We are seeing this so much right now come up not just with the pandemic and how members of minority groups are more heavily impacted by COVID, but also with the Black Lives Matter movement. When humans perceive a lack of fairness we will take to the streets, we will riot, and this is equally true in the workplace. Any time there is a perception of a lack of fairness, organization psychologists see teams ripped apart, companies destroyed, usership decline. MATT:  I have actually seen research as well that shows that it occurs in primates as well, the perception of unfairness. It seems like very, very deep inside us. LARA:  Oh yes. All of this.. There is that great video of the two monkeys.. [laughter] MATT:  Yes. LARA:  All of these things, we see all of these things in animals because, again, this is how we evolved. Our amygdala really… This is not pseudoscience, this is neurology of our limbic system. So the P stands for predictability. We all want to have some sense of certainty and understanding what’s going to happen in the future. Just like choices, we need a balance, too much predictability and things will get really stagnant and we’ll get demotivated and de-energized and totally bored. But too much unpredictability and we will also freak out a bunch. And the last one is significance, which is effectively status. We want to know where we sit in the informal or formal hierarchical structures and how we relate to the power around us. So yes, BICEPS. If I think about this over time, significance used to be the one that would come up most often for me. My amygdala, if it felt like my status was threatened, my amygdala would lose it a little bit. But honestly, since April 2020 predictability is the number one thing I need. Just the volume of change. And everybody is so different. So when we think about mask-wearing, we can actually track back why someone might not wear a face mask to any of these six core needs because they show up super differently in all of us and the same stimulus can threaten any of them. MATT:  Could you do that for me just so I understand?  Would that be choice? LARA: Absolutely. Yes, choice is absolutely one of them. I want to have autonomy over my body. I want to have autonomy and control. Don’t tell me what to do. So you can see how choice might come up. Fairness, it’s unfair that I have to do this, it’s unfair that in order for everybody… I need to get mine. We could do belonging, we don’t want to feel like the uncool kids, we don’t want to feel like we are… we want to feel like part of the in-crowd and who we are surrounded by. I mean, I know this is true where I live. Like the more and more I see people not wearing masks I’m like, oh, if everybody else is not doing it, what am I doing? Now obviously my core need is going to be different there — predictability, I need to have… And choice for me too. I want to have control over my own health and I want to have some semblance of what the future will hold so I’m going to choose to wear it. But yes, you can see how the same stimulus can threaten… Which my normal thing I like to talk about is desk moves. I don’t know if you’ve ever worked for a company where desks were assigned or where people were told to move where they sat every day, but it absolutely caused the most emotional reactions in folks. I talk about it with re-orgs too. Every time there’s a re-org it could threaten any of the six BICEPS core needs. MATT: Acquisition? LARA:  Oh, absolutely, right. Precisely. Literally anything. It’s so relevant. MATT:  The desk move resonates a lot for me because when I moved to San Francisco I worked at a company called CNET Networks. And I started with this really cool corner office and then a VP saw it and I got moved into an interior office. And then there was a re-org and I got moved to the basement and I felt like… oh gosh, who’s that guy from Office Space with the stapler? LARA:  Yes, absolutely. [laughs] MATT:  That character. Don’t take my red stapler. And then I started Automattic. I thought, oh, okay. I probably overcompensated for the lack of office moves. LARA:  I’m curious, if you think about those six core needs in that example, which ones stood out for you? MATT:  Definitely choice, definitely fairness, definitely status. LARA:  Corner office, right. MATT:  I was literally being moved down. LARA:  Yes. [laughs] Yes, it can absolutely threaten multiple, which is why this stuff is so hard because you can’t guess, you really have to think about it and process it. And we are really bad at guessing other people’s… Like when you were telling that story and you mentioned the corner office, I was like it’s going to be significance for Matt. But you didn’t start with significance. You listed it eventually in your list but it was choice first. We are really good at projecting our own onto other people but again, coming back to the listening thing, we’ve got to start asking lots of genuinely curious open questions and listening to people’s answers and preparing to be surprised by what we hear and not just assuming. MATT: One of the other ones that stands out is fairness. Again, at this moment in time we’re at where there is so much going on is people’s perception of fairness to a third party might be unfair. So there’s almost a point of view to fairness. LARA:  Absolutely. And we all are our first person — MATT:  How do we navigate that? What did you say, we’re all our own..? LARA: Our own first person. We are all the protagonist of our own story, things are happening to us. And so any perception of fairness from where I’m sitting is going to be very different from where you’re sitting. Which is why as managers I think it is so important to develop some of those empathy muscles, but mostly just to do this act of reflecting back what you’re hearing the other person say to make sure you have it right. Like, okay, what I’m hearing you say is blah and then just asking “is that right? Do I have that wrong?” and waiting for them to respond is so powerful. And triple-checking that again you’re not just projecting or assuming, that you don’t have it wrong. MATT: And by these being amygdala lizard brain reactions, is it also fair to say they are not always rational? LARA: Yes, they’re almost never… MATT: Like your rational mind might disagree with it? LARA:  Well it’s funny, so your amygdala, its whole job is to be looking out into your environment for threats, threats and rewards, that is the only thing it’s categorizing. And if it gets a sense that a threat is headed your way, if the threat feels significant enough it actually tells your prefrontal cortex, the rational, logical part of you, to go on standby. Because your amygdala is a lot faster than your PFC and your amygdala can actually make sure it can keep you safe. It can tell you to run and jump and duck and hide to avoid danger. If split-second decisions were left up to your prefrontal cortex we would never have survived the many wooly-mammoth attacks that got us to where we are today. So when we are amygdala-hijacked our rational, logical brain is nowhere to be found. And on average it takes about 30 minutes after you have removed the threat from your environment for your PFC to come back online, and that’s if you’re not still stewing on it. If you’re still stewing on it, your brain is still releasing these chemicals into your body from your amygdala, it’s just like nope, still in threat mode. So it can take a long time for your rational, logical brain to come back online. MATT:  Do we just live in an era of these always being activated? LARA:  With the pandemic I am seeing it all around me. And our PFC is a finite resource anyway. Usually by 3 or 4PM in our workday it’s shot. No more decisions should be made. The eight-hour workday is an absolute lie when it comes to this. So it is already a finite resource and the fact that our amygdalas are just constantly on overdrive, every single thing right now is a threat, physically, emotionally. I think about all the parents who are struggling also with figuring out… everybody in their household, all their amygdalas and their core needs, it’s just… Our poor prefrontal cortexes are overloaded at the moment. MATT:  Well knowing this how do we not become victims in this story? LARA:  The number one thing I recommend to folks is to figure out what’s your number one core need right now. Like I said, it’s usually significance for me and then after about a month of not figuring out what I needed, like, really having a hard time, I started to think about okay, what’s mine? If it’s not significance right now, what’s mine? Feeling this bad right now is a clue to me that I’ve got to do some more thinking and research. So once I put my finger on the fact that it was predictability, I put a little sticky note on my laptop, I still have it here actually with a little star next to it that just says ‘predictability,’ as a reminder to myself the I need to optimize everything in my life for creating this. Because I can’t get it in the outside world. I don’t know when a vaccine is going to hit, I don’t understand what the next few months are going to look like, so I need to take every opportunity I can to create more predictability. In my case, I had… the vast majority of my income for Q2 and Q3 were coming from in-person workshops, so me talking to a room of 40 managers. Obviously those could no longer happen. So how do I take this complete lack of predictability — and obviously compounded with other things, lack of choice, lack of fairness, yada yada yada — but really try to say okay what is one thing I can do today to create more predictability? And again, predictability might not be your core need right now but it’s really important for everybody to take a look at this list of six core needs and say, okay, what is my number one and how can I make sure I’m reminded every single day to get one new thing to happen to nourish this core need? Or, if I have to choose between two things, as yourself which one is going to get me more of that core need right now? Use it as a north star to help you out of this season that we’re in. MATT:  I want to dive into knowing this for others. But first, a quick sidebar since again a lot of the people listening to this work at distributed companies. Have you developed any thoughts yet on virtual or non-in-person versions of what you do and what could be effective? LARA:  Yes. So I almost exclusively now do this virtually. I’ve been able to, thank goodness, within about three weeks of everything changing, create a bunch of new workshops that are more ad hoc so people can sign up for the individual workshops, one-on-one, or, it’s so easy, I’ve always brought them into distributed companies anyway, I’ve just made it much more of a clear offering. Just last month I had this opportunity to do this leadership program for a distributed company’s employee resource group for marginalized genders. So it was a four-week global program all over video and it has just been… who knew that a pandemic could really bring to the surface some really important business decisions for me going forward. MATT:  Wow. LARA:  Yes. MATT:  And also for anyone listening, they can get in touch with your website, right, Wherewithall? LARA:  Yes, Wherewithall.com, two Ls. Thanks, Matt. MATT:  Perfect. Well no, I think obviously we’ve been a customer in the past and hope to be one again in the future. So we’ve talked a lot about the self-awareness version of the BICEPS and asking the questions.  You refer to some of these questions for asking others. So if I’m a manager and it feels like someone I work with is really having a reaction that doesn’t seem rational or that’s not moving things forward, what should be my first thing to do? Because normally telling someone to calm down or something would be counterproductive. LARA:  Yes. Any time someone has told me to calm down I think it has had the opposite… MATT:  Right? [laughter] LARA:  My amygdala is like, oh yeah? See this? MATT:  Just relax. LARA:  Yes. [laughter] So when I’m a manager my choice here will be dependent upon my relationship with this person. Either we have worked together a bunch in which case they are familiar with the BICEPS core needs list or they are someone who I think would be cool talking this through. I find that handing them this list, showing them the website, or showing them a handy link, it actually does this beautiful job of bringing someone’s prefrontal cortex back on line because what you’re doing is asking them for a second to do a little bit of a problem-solving exercise, like it’s a puzzle. Like, okay, which of these six things is it? It’s a beautiful practice in getting your prefrontal cortex back online. So if they are already familiar, if I think they’re going to be interested in the brain science stuff, I will describe these core needs and just have a very frank conversation. I will say let’s read through these together and as we do this start to think about which one or maybe multiple of these might feel really true for you right now? But let’s say I don’t know them that well or it doesn’t feel like this is a time to go into the brain science part or to walk through this acronym together because sometimes that can feel a little cheesy, like here’s this management framework. So in the other case I’m just going to ask them one of these really short, open ended questions that starts with the word ‘what.’ Okay, let’s just take a step back. What feels really motivating to you right now? Or, cool, I just want to at a high level start to think about what’s the number one most important thing on your list? What’s your north star right now? What are you optimizing for? I will pick maybe max two of these questions and ask them after giving them lots and lots of space to unload and process out loud. Usually from that I will start to then reflect back what I’m hearing, like, okay, so it sounds like if you had had more choice here or if you could have made this decision yourself, that would have felt better. Do I have that right? And then they’ll say yes or no and we’ll go from there. That’s me pinpointing what this might be. And hopefully down the road we can actually have a more fun chat about BICEPS core needs but even if we never get there at least I can figure out okay, let’s creatively address this core need for this person. Because they can’t get it.. In the corner office example, you were moving into the basement eventually. You couldn’t have controlled that. But as your manager I might have said, okay, where can we get you some more choice here, or where can we create some more significance for you here? MATT:  It seems like the interrupt there is almost like that pause and question and reflection. LARA: Mhm, yes. It’s pretty magical. One of the things that I learned in coach training that I would have never realized was happening until I saw it firsthand was the act of giving someone space to share what they are thinking and not responding with what it means to you, not responding with ‘oh yes, and also this.’ And not coming up with the next thing you want to say while they’re still speaking but actively listening, actively hearing them, and then reflecting back what you just heard them say is this really bizarre, beautiful thing that happens. It is just so rare that we have someone actually listen to what we are saying and then triple check that they have it right. Yes. I can’t describe how powerful it is. MATT:  I feel like I can do the more often than not if I’m in real time with the person having a conversation. But often with asynchronous work, I arrive at the scene hours or maybe even days later. What would be a way to apply that in an asynchronous manner? LARA:  That is a great question. I think that a lot of this too is going to be dependent upon what you’re optimizing for, what your core need is. If my amygdala is hijacked there is no amount of intention I can put into it to be a good active listener. So I think from a distributed community perspective, checking in with yourself and making sure that your prefrontal cortex is active as you’re reading through messages or as you’re getting ready for whatever your next thing is, triple-checking that your amygdala isn’t super active and online but rather you’re feeling pretty chilled out can help to be a centering moment before your start to read these messages. Now it is a super natural thing to read a message and say okay, how does this relate to me? Okay, how does this impact the thing that I want to do? Or, what are they trying to ask of me right now? Those are all very ‘me’ focused, which is by the way normal. That is a normal human thing that I think is appropriate. It’s just about what is the impact that you want to have. If the impact that you want to have is to move a project forward then it’s totally okay to have your own perspective and to be thinking about how it relates to you and the project. If your intention is to make this person feel really supported or really help them grow, that’s when it’s really important to have that reflecting back, make sure that you’re actively hearing what they are saying and not thinking about how it relates to you. MATT:  Is there a version of this that could improve Twitter? LARA:  [laughter] I can’t imagine. Because Twitter is all about the one-to-many voice. It’s not about active listening. I find that with Twitter the thing that helps me a lot is tweeting questions instead of statements. I found this especially when I try to enact some change. Because then it’s like I’m trying to communicate a statement via a question, not a leading one, not saying what if we tried blah, blah, blah. But rather saying okay, in this moment… Let’s pretend what I’m trying to do is get everybody to start to think about their BICEPS core needs. Instead of saying, hey, here is this really cool framework, here is how it has worked for me, you should all check it out, I might say, hey, what is most motivating to you right now? Just a rhetorical question. Just take two minutes and think what is most motivating to you right now or what is terrifying for you right now? Then compare and contrast to this link and see what you think. It’s actively asking a question that prompts an introspective response that I think can be real valuable. But yeah, I don’t think that Twitter is usually the medium for enacting huge amounts of change. That’s my opinion. MATT:  What’s interesting is our internal blogging system, or email, often has elements which are public, it might be public to a smaller audience, but… I find that people can… When you have that amygdala reaction and that becomes memorialized in a written thing there starts to be an identity that you end up defending it a bit more or being attached to it than you might if it were just part of a conversation. LARA:  Absolutely. And the creators of the character The Hulk really tapped into this. Bruce Banner and The Hulk are the same person but we know more about The Hulk. We can associate The Hulk, we think about that character so much more I think than most of us think about Bruce Banner. So if all that’s documented is your Hulk version… And by the way, The  Hulk is just literally Bruce Banner’s amygdala growing three sizes. When we get amygdala-hijacked we turn into different versions of ourselves, versions that we’re not proud of. So if what’s documented about us is our Hulk version that’s what we’re going to be known for. And honestly, any time that stuff is memorialized, you’re totally right, I’ve got amygdala triggers, I know what they are. If anybody brings up the hills that I’m going to die on, my Hulk version of myself is going to be right near the surface. MATT:  Hmm, I definitely have got to think about that. I have heard myself in recent months, in conversations, where I was trying to be open and vulnerable but the person on the other side of the tweet screen I felt like was the opposite. LARA:  Yes. MATT:  And that can be challenging. And probably the best thing then is just to walk away, or at least what I’ve tried to do. LARA:  Yes. A lot of my workshops and coaching sessions that are focused on these things are all about developing a back-pocket script for yourself. To end a conversation with a promise to return to it once everybody’s amygdalas are chilled out but to end it in a way that doesn’t escalate it, to actually end it in a way that feels safe and can help everybody chill out. I like to have something really short that feels natural to say and then a really quick, like, here’s the next time we can check in about this. Mine, because I work with so many people who I talk about this stuff with, mine is literally I’m so sorry, my amygdala is really hijacked right now, can we talk about this at our next one-on-one, would that be okay? And for people who know me those are real, natural words that I would say. And so it’s easy for me to pull that out of my back pocket and it’s a signal to everybody, like, oh, one or both of our amygdalas is on fire right now, you’re right, let’s chill out for a bit. MATT:  You have a great moment in the book where you talk about tapping into the best qualities of your colleagues like a management Voltron. LARA:  Yes, yes. MATT:  I’m liking a little bit of a comic book theme here. LARA:  [laughter]  Yes. It harkens back to the 1980s television show, Voltron, where you have a group of super heroes that come together and form a giant super robot, à la Captain Planet or any number of television shows. MATT:  Power Rangers? LARA: Yes, Power Rangers, exactly, they come together and form a giant thing. So the idea here is we as individuals, we often rely on our manager for their support and their coaching and their mentorship to learn and grow but that manager is just one person. We all are just one person that has a particular set of skills and experiences and ways that we can help each other. So your manager can’t be your everything. I think to the managers of my past and how each of them always had some things I could learn from but not all the things that I needed. [laughs] So the Voltron idea is that you shouldn’t just lean on this one person to support you as you grow but you should amass a Voltron of different kinds of people each of whom have a different set of experiences and perspectives and skillsets who can come together and be your ideal manager. And that’s going to be custom to the individual. Like what I need from my manager is probably very different than what you would need from a manager. So it’s important to think about what are the things that I need in order to grow or based on where I am in my career or the kind of company that I worked for. When I left Kickstarter and started doing more consulting work, I got to experience so many other kinds of companies that were not primarily public benefit corporations or mission-driven organizations but totally different kinds, different ages, different sizes. And so to have a perspective from someone else who understands those kinds of organizations, who can share with me their ways of operating or their opinions or their frameworks, has been invaluable. And that list of people needs continue to grow as you grow. MATT:  How do you walk the line between realizing when other people’s amygdalas might be hijacked and trying to deescalate or come back to the conversation with something like a tone policing, or something you would normally encourage people not to do? LARA:  Absolutely. I think it is really important to state your goal. Because without stating a goal, people might perceive your action as shutting them down. So saying something like… Like, in the feedback example, now when someone comes up to me after I give a talk, if it’s in person, which who knows when that will happen again… [laughter] But in the past if someone came up to me after a talk I gave and was like, “Hey, great presentation, can I give you some feedback?” I have learned to say, “I would really love to hear your feedback, I just know I can’t right now, do you mind sending me an email?” Which is my way of stating the goal — I am interested in hearing this feedback or I am interested in continuing this conversation, I can’t. You don’t have to say my amygdala is hijacked. And you don’t have to say that the other person’s amygdala is hijacked. You can just say hey, I really deeply care about us coming to a good solution here, or I really want to make sure both of our needs are met in this one.. It feels like now is not the right time for our brains. It’s so important to me though, when can we chat about this next, maybe when we have had some time to chew on it? MATT:  And how has that gone? LARA: Oh, so well. Who is going to be like, no? [laugther] MATT:  I need it to be written. Well, probably not someone who you want to hear from. LARA:  Right. It’s actually been really funny because I had this one person come up to me after a presentation and ask me that question, I said… I didn’t actually say even you can talk to me later, in this case I just said “no thanks,” because there was something about the situation that just didn’t feel right, didn’t smell right. And he took a step back and he was like, “whoa, I was always taught to say that but I’ve never actually had someone say no before.” And I was like, “cool. What else do you want to talk about?” And so we started talking about something else and then maybe five minutes later he was like, “oh, whoa, I see why you said no.” As in like, “we needed to chat first.” It was almost like the act of me saying no opened up this whole new world of possibilities for him about the way that these conversations could go. [laughs] It was really cool. MATT:  Really beautiful. I’m glad that went that way. LARA:  Yes. But contrast that… I was playing a video game the other night with a group of people and two people got really amygdala-hijacked and one person tried to wrap it up, tried to be like, okay, let’s reconvene, let’s do this raid later, we shouldn’t be doing this right now. And they were both in such an amygdala-hijacked state that neither of them could hear it. And so I think in those situations, no matter how polite you are, how clear you are, how whatever you are, sometimes our Hulk moments will continue to play out. In that case, I tell people to take the space that you need, do what you need to be safe, to keep your brain and your body safe. Exit that situation. MATT:  It seems like video games are also where you’re going to be riled up. LARA:  Always. It’s amazing to me. MATT:  That’s kind of the purpose in some of them. LARA:  Yes. Well, there’s a lot of studies about it. And coming back to the core needs at work, there’s this brilliant study about belonging where they ran this experiment where some people weren’t chosen as players in a video game and the same parts of their brains lit up as if they were experiencing physical pain. Again, belonging. All of these core needs are core to how we have evolved. Like any time we feel left out… So yes, video games are absolutely… Just all of these things can totally threaten our amygdala. MATT:  What video game should all managers play? LARA:  I think every manager should get practice leading a raid group or leading a guild of some sort and trying to corral a group of six people around a section of a video game. It teaches people so many management skills, it’s amazing to me. [laughter] MATT:  That’s cool. LARA:  Yes. MATT:  Which ones do you like? I’m not as into… or current on video games. What do you recommend? LARA:  I can’t say that I can safely recommend them but the ones that I am currently playing, the one in particular is called Destiny. It’s just lots of aliens… keeping the solar system safe from some aliens. It’s nice to be able to be vegetable-mode after my amygdala and prefrontal cortex have had a long day, to just check out. Video games have definitely been a safe place for me to recuperate. MATT:  That sounds like a lot of fun and I will take that as some homework as well and try to make some time for that. LARA:  Amazing. MATT:  Thank you so much for this conversation. I learned a lot and I really appreciated that you’re taking the time to share your experience and your learnings with a wider audience. LARA:  Thank you so much for having me. It has been a pleasure. MATT:  All righty. This has been Distributed with Matt Mullenweg. And Lara, where can people find out more about you, Twitter, websites, etcetera? LARA:  People can come find me at @Lara_Hogan on Twitter or on Wherewithall.com. MATT:  That sounds good. I encourage everyone to do so. We will also include links to these questions that you mentioned and more in the show notes. So check that out at Distributed.blog.

Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. “We have introduced so many frictions to people’s lives by forcing them to move.” Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury, the Lumry Family Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, studies the future of work — specifically the changing geography of work. What happens to cities, to immigration policies, and to issues around gender equity when more companies let people work from anywhere? Choudhury earned his doctorate from Harvard, has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology, and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management. Prior to academia, he worked at McKinsey & Company, Microsoft, and IBM. For more on Choudhury, go to HBS.edu or follow him on Twitter (@prithwic). The full episode transcript is below. *** (Intro Music) MATT MULLENWEG:  So here we are. It’s been more than three months into this global transition to remote work. And let’s be honest, a lot of this has been difficult and exhausting and even for folks at Automattic, who have been doing distributed work for 15 years, it’s quite different when there is a global pandemic and economic uncertainty everywhere. But there have been a ton of positives too. I’ve heard from many friends who are working in knowledge-worker roles and they’re saying “I never want to go back into a full time office,” particularly with the restrictions that these physical offices are probably going to have. So they’re seeing benefits in their  productivity, their lifestyle, and their connection with their families and their life. So there is uncertainty but there is also opportunity. Today I am excited to speak with Raj Choudhury, a professor at Harvard Business School, who is focused on questions around the geography of work and the outcomes of mobility on productivity. He has studied this question very closely and I was excited to find out what he has learned. So welcome, Raj. RAJ CHOUDURY:  Hi Matt, thanks for having me. MATT:  Oh it’s a real pleasure. What brought you to study all this? RAJ:  So I’ve been studying essentially the future of work, but the topic I have been studying for a long time is geographic mobility. So that includes studying both cross-border migration but also what happens to productivity when people move within the same country. And as I was doing that research for the past eight, nine years, I discovered that there are lots of reasons why people do not move. So yes, there’s productivity benefits when they move but there are tons of reasons we have immobility. So the obvious reason would be immigration, but dual careers, even the cost of living, which might be super expensive in a place like Silicon Valley, might constrain geographic moves. So as I was doing that research, I was thinking of solutions to that problem. And then I stumbled upon that U.S. Patent Office experiment with letting people work from anywhere, which would presumably solve this problem of trying to move people to Alexandria, Virginia. So that’s how I arrived at this topic. MATT:  And people moving for work in the U.S., I have heard it’s gone down actually over the past 20 years or so. RAJ:  That is correct. So we are in this era of not only people moving less within the country but also internationally. We just have all these constraints on immigration not only in the U.S. but it’s tightening in many parts of the world. So the other great example would be what’s happening with Brexit and what it means for the talent coming from continental Europe. Yes, so I think we are in this phase of immobility on the rise. MATT:  So here’s where I say something random I’ve heard and you can tell me whether it’s correct or not. I’ve heard part of the, one of the hypotheses for why in the U.S. mobility was going down was double-income houses. So it was harder to find two new jobs in one city versus one new job. RAJ:  That’s true. And there is also research done by other colleagues, not me, which has shown that in those dual-career situations, Matt, it’s typically the wife who is the trailing spouse. So women have made disproportionately greater sacrifices in dual-career situations. And that’s among many of the reasons why I am super excited about working from anywhere. MATT:  Because even if one spouse can get that flexibility, they can maintain. If one spouse has it and one spouse doesn’t, they can still move, because one of the jobs is not geographically constrained. RAJ:  That’s true. And one of the subpopulations that I’ve been working closely with for whom this is a huge deal is military spouses, because they just have to constantly be on the move. And now they don’t have to experience a break in their careers. So I think that group and many other groups have been tremendously benefited with work from anywhere. MATT:  That’s awesome to hear. Because if we get this right it benefits so many people’s lives. RAJ:  Correct, yes. MATT:  These past three months I don’t think any of us would have predicted, but it must be a boon for your data collection and research. So what has happened that you found surprising or unusual or heterodox? RAJ:  Actually I would argue that these three months are such an anomaly. This is not normal work in any way. Even under normal, remote work, you are not having to homeschool kids, you’re not prohibited from going to the gym, you’re not stressed out because of people being sick in your family. So I feel that this will be less relevant for research in terms of driving generalizable findings. So what I’ve been doing is I’ve been studying work from anywhere years before the pandemic and I feel once we come back to a more, quote/unquote, “normal” situation it will be, again, fun to see what happens with which companies and which workers stick with remote work. I think that is something I’m super excited to study going ahead. MATT:  Yes, there have been a ton of announcements already — Stripe, Shopify, Facebook, Square, Twitter. Is there anything coming out of that? Are we seeing more mobility from their employees or any early indications? I know it’s too early to see big data but… RAJ:  Yes. I think there’s been tons of very exciting announcements. And I can tell you about one project which I am personally working on very closely and that relates to TCS, which as you would know is the largest IT service company headquartered in India. I hesitate to call them an Indian company because they are truly global. They have 500,000 employees, they have three campuses in China, they have campuses in the U.S., they have a campus in Hungary and of course tons of campuses in India. And what they did in the past six weeks was the CEO made an announcement saying that 75 percent of their workforce would become remote in three years. So that is one situation I am working closely with because this… It’s probably four to five times of Facebook and they have built all these campuses and for them now to go 75 percent remote, I thought that was super interesting in terms of the challenges they have to overcome and the change in the processes and the culture and whatnot. MATT:  One thing I heard from other companies when they worked with partners in India that had offices, it was harder for people to work from home because they might not have the home setup which is as productive as the office, meaning literally internet, power, etcetera. Have you come across anything like that? RAJ:  So I feel that’s still true in parts of not only India but parts of emerging markets. But I feel with now better fiberoptic connectivity and all the transitions… In the case of India, just this one single Reliance Jio sort of proliferation has increased internet penetration and speeds tremendously. So I feel that is less of a concern now. And just given the tradeoffs. So I was speaking to a group of TCS employees and many of them said they will now leave large cities, like Chennai, and move back to their native villages because that’s where their family lives, that’s where they really want to live, given a choice. MATT:  We ran into this in South Africa. We bought a company based there and a lot of people would want to go into the office, it was just much harder to get fast internet at home, like it was maxed out at DSL. I even had a colleague outside of Austin that ended up having to put a tower on his property because he’s a little more in the country and there wasn’t a good wired service. So he had to move to some point to point wireless. When you think of the hierarchy of distributed work, internet is probably the base. It’s like the oxygen in the room for getting that. RAJ:  Sure. MATT:  I’m curious if wireless will be able to support mass people doing high bandwidth things at the same time. It’s definitely scaled far beyond what I would have imagined. But we shall see. RAJ:  Yes, you’re right. But the way I think about this, Matt, is not only internet and wireless but it’s also the host of other services that remote workers would need, including schooling, good quality schools, healthcare. But I feel it’s a chicken and egg. So my conjecture, my belief at least is if large numbers of people experience a reverse brain drain and move back to middle America or move back to smaller towns in emerging markets, those services will follow. So the other project I’m working on right now is with Tulsa Remote. So Tulsa Remote, as you might know, has been — MATT:  Yes, I just blogged about that. RAJ:  Yes, so I’ve been working with them and it’s been a super interesting situation to study from many, many perspectives for me. MATT:  Do you want to talk about it really quick for the podcast listeners? RAJ:  Sure. So Tulsa Remote started about two and a half years back and the intent was to bring remote workers to live in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So they offered, as an incentive, $10,000 to each person moving. And these were people moving from the coasts, from Houston, Texas, and they would be all working remotely. And what they keep saying… So, as I did all this work over the past few months, they keep saying that $10,000 is just the starting point for the discussion to begin. So no one would move their family and their lives for $10,000, they would move for other reasons. And one of the reasons might be it’s cheaper to raise a young family in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Or you are the kind of person who wants to really contribute to a city which desperately needs to think about diversity. So they have been extremely successful. They moved I want to say about 200 to 250 people in the past. And this is all pre-pandemic. But they got like thousands of applications. MATT:  Wow. RAJ:  And the applications were extremely diverse. They were people from all parts of America, all races, and a large number of women who moved. And the wonderful thing that it did was in choosing who should come they involved the Tulsa local community. So there was actually a wonderful event that they organized where community members voted with Post-Its on applications just to make sure that these guys coming in would feel welcomed by the community. MATT:  That is pretty cool, although I don’t know why you’re taking people from Texas. [laughter] I’m in Houston right now, actually. RAJ:  Yeah. MATT: One of the big fears that people have for distributed or remote work is that people will not be as productive, like if they’re not in the office how do I know they’re working. What have you found there so far? RAJ:  I think that’s one of the fears. So I feel the setting that I studied extremely carefully was the U.S. Patent Office setting. So there actually the benefit was that productivity was extremely objectively measurable. You knew to almost the day how many patents were being examined by each patent examiner, so shirking was less of a concern. But I can see that to be a general concern in many settings that people will just shirk and there will be free riders on teams. The other concern I have… and I don’t think people will explicitly state this… but managers seem to have this expectation in many cases that their questions… they’ll tap a shoulder, ask a question, and people will respond in the minute. And I feel the change in mindset, which is critical, so as I studied there all-remote companies such as Gitlab and Zapier, the realization I had again and again was you will not get an answer right away because people might be in a different time zone. So you need to move towards asynchronous communication, put your stuff on Slack, and then just trust that people will wake up and answer your question. But I don’t think that’s an easy habit to change. And you might have a perspective on that given your experiences. But I feel the fear of shirking and giving up that freedom or that flexibility of letting people answer two hours after I posed the question would be the two biggest changes in habit. MATT:  Yes. I think that if you can unlock that asynchronicity it’s really, really powerful for organizations. But it is an adjustment, particularly for managers. Shirking, I think that you have the problem that people could do less work but then it’s easier to see because you have solved the problem for people who would do everything that looks like work in the office — they look professional, they show up at meetings, they ask questions but weren’t actually producing anything. RAJ:  Correct. MATT:  Which I think is maybe a larger epidemic in the professional world. RAJ:  Yes. MATT:  Where a lot of people do the things that look like work but aren’t actually contributing to your bottom line. RAJ:  Yes, yes, you’re totally right. I feel especially… If the productivity measures are objectively defined, I am sort of like… You know, many people have asked me in the past few weeks what do you think about surveillance, putting automated software on computers. And I keep thinking that is a horrible idea, that has to backfire. I feel yes, you need some productivity measures that are objectively defined but you totally need to trust people, your colleagues, your subordinates. That trust is going to be a key part of the culture of being a remote organization. MATT:  Do you yourself work distributed with your team? RAJ:  I do, yes. So I have been doing this even before the crisis and I still have to be physically at Harvard while teaching but who knows, maybe in a decade that will change as well. MATT:  Yes, are classes going to be reopening there? RAJ:  We don’t know yet. I think there will be some hybrid form is my expectation but I don’t know. I’m going to teach in the spring, which might be different from the fall, so who knows. MATT:  That will be interesting to see. So much of the value it seems like from these higher institutions, especially the super prestigious ones, comes from people being together. RAJ:  Correct. But I think the general principle… And that collocation argument can be made for any organization, right? MATT:  Mhm. RAJ:  And before I stepped into the world of Gitlab and Zapier and Seek, my prior, like many others, was that this can work for certain rules, so maybe if the person is working independently, for coders and designers this might work, but then working with Zapier and working with Gitlab and working with Seek, I have come to realize that this can work for any role, any level of the hierarchy, as long as you have the supporting organizational processes and the culture baked in to support this. MATT:  What do you think the macro economic implications are for this new way of working? RAJ:  I think about that all the time. And especially, as you probably would have realized by now, the form of remote work I am most excited about is work from anywhere. So it’s not the work from home that is being forced on us right now. So in work from anywhere once again you can choose where to live. So you can relocate to a smaller town or to your country, back to your country, or even to a rural area. And you might work from home there or you may actually work from a co-working space. So the Tulsa Remote people are actually offered a co-working space in this facility in Tulsa that is called 36 Degrees North. So you could choose to work at home, that’s totally cool, but you don’t have to. So when I think of work from anywhere, I feel there are lots of very, very interesting macroeconomic implications. First, you will experience a reverse brain drain coming back to the smaller towns of middle America and back to the emerging markets. We will see urban decongestion. So we’ve been predicting two and a half to three billion people to live in the cities, maybe we will actually see half of that. And once the white collar folks move back, there has to be blue collar folks who are incentivized to move back too because there’ll be more construction in these smaller towns, there will be more services in the smaller towns. So the climate outcomes, the urban congestion outcomes,  you can just think about all the second-, third-order effects. And I feel that is the thing that really excites me about the phenomenon. MATT:  Yes, the blue collar work moving seems to make sense, right? I imagine it’s not called trickle-down economics but is there an academic term for when people move back and start injecting their salary back into the local economy? RAJ:  Yes, it’s a classic multiplier effect. So once enough white collar people move back there’ll be construction, there’ll be all kinds of needs for restaurants, and healthcare workers and everyone else. And then what might happen is that this urban mass migration that we have seen with… not only in the U.S. but worldwide… and some of the cities in the emerging markets are really, literally breaking at the seams. So if you go back to my home town of Calcutta or Taka or Bangalore, it takes three hours to get from point A to point B, which is ridiculous, right? MATT: Wow. RAJ:  And with all kinds of negative externalities on climate outcomes and whatnot. Water — water resources are just like completely out of proportion in those locations. So I feel once enough people, the white collar force, moves back, the blue collar force will not have to leave those smaller towns or the hinterlands of those smaller towns. MATT:  And is that because these towns, or these cities in emerging markets, grew up too quickly versus where in the U.S. they were able to grow over hundreds of years and build more infrastructure along the way? RAJ:  That’s partly one. But I also feel, just given the dynamics of what I would call agglomeration economy, something that Ed Glazer and Enrico Moretti at Berkeley and others have studied, there was almost a gravity pull towards these extremely large global cities. So Bangalore got identified with the IT service industry, Delhi with the NCR region, with call centers. The same thing happened in Manila, the same thing happened in multiple Chinese cities. So I feel once we now let people choose where to live, especially if a large number of millennials start not moving to the cities… And the other interesting thing about millennials is this global… the globe-trotting that goes on with the digital nomads. So if we see enough of these complementary phenomena, then we’ll see less congestion in the cities and then the blue collar work doesn’t have to move to the city and live in terrible conditions in the slums. MATT:  Sometimes I wonder as well if we’re seeing a homogenization of cities where cities are starting to look more like each other than they do the more rural areas even surrounding them. RAJ:  Correct. MATT:  Because there is this kind of like global culture that much of the economic growth has been concentrated in. I have heard it called the Airbnb aesthetic, [laughter] the exposed brick, the Edison lightbulbs, the open plan seating. But that was all in an environment that really rewarded people being physically proximate as one of the benefits. RAJ:  Yes. MATT:  And that was already under I feel like attack from an academic point of view, meaning that open plan offices appear to be less productive than when people had privacy, or private doors, and now it’s under attack from a biological point of view, where now that has an increased risk from something like a coronavirus. RAJ:  Correct, yes. MATT: Interesting, interesting. You mentioned Ed Glazer? RAJ:  Yes. MATT:  Who are either your colleagues or people doing research in the field that you think everyone in remote work or distributed should know about that they don’t? RAJ:  So I guess the thing is remote work was so out of the paradigm of mainstream prior to this crisis. There has been research of course, so Batia Wiesenfeld at NYU has been studying remote work, Ravi Gajendran at the University of Florida has studied remote work. There is a very, very good paper by Nick Boom and colleagues at Stanford where they looked at this Chinese call center. There was an actual experiment there where they measured productivity before and after working from home. And then we, I did the work with the U.S. Patent Office. But I feel the field academically is probably still at very, very early days. And now I see tons of people joining the field, which is great, so I’m super excited about that. MATT:  What would be most helpful to your work? You probably have dozens of CEOs listening to this as distributed companies. RAJ:  I guess what I’m super interested about is whether this crisis… I will tell you what I’m not excited about, Matt, and then I’ll tell you what I’m excited about. I know a lot of academic energy is being spent trying to understand whether productivity will dip or not dip in these three, four, six months. And I feel that is an exercise which is not very helpful because once the crisis is hopefully behind us soon, we will not be in a crisis anymore, so why do we want to generalize the findings from a crisis? And just my prior productivity is going to dip. And academically the thing is studying remote work now is confounded, as we say in economic parlance, by the stress and the lack of child care and the lack of separation between the work life and the family life. What I am much more interested about and excited to study with anyone who is interested is whether this crisis acts as a turning point for remote work and especially work from anywhere to move from an HR discussion to a CEO discussion. And with others like the TCS CEO, like Facebook, like the companies you mentioned, whether CEOs start thinking of work from anywhere and remote work as a device to hire talent globally… So now I could hire folks from Iran who will never get a visa to come and work in the U.S., or this might be a great way to engage Chinese talent, which is going to get a lot of pressure from immigration going ahead. Whether this would be a great way to bring more women back into the workforce or make them more productive. So I feel those discussions are really, really cool and I am happy to engage with anyone who wants to have that discussion. MATT:  I am also really excited about that. Also for Automattic we are doing it with global pay equity. So we’re not discriminating on the basis of geography and the pay, which I think also opens up a lot of opportunities for all of those places you just mentioned. Although I think Iran and China are.. happen to be places where it’s difficult for us to hire because of the firewall in China blocks most of our services, and I think there’s some sanctions in Iran. But we have folks in 77 countries otherwise and we try to keep people in the same ranges regardless of what geography in the U.S. or internationally, we think same pay for same work. And that could inject a ton of economic opportunity into places where there’s been less with the way the economy has developed so far. RAJ:  No you’re totally right. So I’ll make three quick points. So the first thing I’ll say is that I’m seeing a lot of opportunities and business models development where Canadian startups, and I am actually working very closely with one of them, they are trying to arbitrage this current impasse with the U.S. immigration system. Because what you can do in a near shore center in Vancouver or Calgary or Halifax is essentially take the people who are getting rejected for U.S. H1B [visas] or a green card, put them in Canada, and they get expedited visa processing there and then they can just work remotely for whichever tech company they used to work for in the U.S. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is, of course as you said, now it’s not only Canada and the western coast of Canada, now you have the ability to hire talent in Kenya, in northern Scotland, in Bangladesh. So actually I’ll tell you about Bangladesh. I visited that country last year and I asked a group of CEOs, god forbid if the textile sector collapses, which is happening right now, what would be your next industry? And the answer was it’s going to be software because they have a very large chunk of independent developers who are all on GitHub, they’re all on Stack Overflow, they are incredibly talented, but there is no software firm there to hire them. So I think work from anywhere is just a gold mine for any global software company to find these pockets of talent in Bangladesh or Kenya or wherever this talent exists. So I guess that’s the discussion. And the gender issue as well. I keep coming back to that because I feel this is such a wonderful device to ensure equity on gender, based on everything I have seen with trailing spouses and the sacrifices women are forced to make. MATT:  What is your take on the pay equity? I have actually had executives in other countries, like India, tell me we’re going to mess it up because the market, the local market won’t support that sort of thing or if it does it will totally distort it and people will have issues with their families and… I don’t know, they seemed to be pretty against it. RAJ: So let me understand your question. You’re saying that when a company does work from anywhere should you keep the wages at an equitable level or should you play around with the wages? Is that the…? MATT:  Yeah, if the average wage in a different country is 30K versus 60K or something, should you be proportional to that? RAJ:  And I’ve been asked that question a lot recently given what I think the Facebook announcement mentioned that they will allow 50 percent workers to work from anywhere but there might be wage consequences. The way I think about this, Matt, is at least the context I studied super deeply, the U.S. Patent Office, they did not cut wages. So this was actually more money in the pockets of people when they moved to cheaper locations. And more than half of the people in the Patent Office moved to cheaper locations. I feel if a company adjusts wages downwards, it just immediately creates the potential for a competitor to say, hey we’re going to do work from anywhere but no wage deduction. Right? So I don’t know why the equilibrium will be wage deduction. Just putting my economist hat on, I feel the equilibrium will be some company arbitraging this and saying we are going to skim the talent on the right tail of the distribution by not reducing wages downwards. MATT:  That’s what we’ve been doing, so… But I have also heard on the other side, folks in the wealthier countries, worry that this will bring down the average. Like if there is a global minimum wage it’s probably not $15 an hour like they’re moving to in the U.S. So what’s the answer there? I’ve seen people say that people are worried about robot automation but actually global… equality opportunity to global jobs will probably have a bigger impact on the middle class in America than almost anything else. RAJ:  Yes but the flip side of that argument is that even if I’m in America, I don’t now have to live in Silicon Valley and support Silicon Valley cost of living. So if indeed that happens, like hypothetically that happens, then the option available to the Silicon Valley worker is to move to Tulsa where it is way cheaper to live and it’s probably an order of magnitude closer to what the emerging market cost of living is in many parts of the emerging markets. So I feel that is the equilibrium that might emerge. Yes, if the wages on average get depressed but it’s still equitable, then the expectation would be that in the U.S. people would leave the super expensive cities and move to places which are cheaper to live. MATT: But like you mentioned, they might not have the infrastructure for things like education yet. One thing I’ve heard from Bay Area friends is they want to move but their kids are in a school that they really, really like and there is no equivalent of it in some of these… in a place like Tulsa or Houston yet. RAJ: That’s true. And that might change very dramatically. But also that might change because the schools themselves might go partly remote, right? So I feel there are lots of opportunities to innovate on business models for everything, including schools. So I was actually with a group of 1,000 principals from India a couple of weekends back. And they have amazing teachers and I told them look, you have amazing teachers teaching this class of 50 people while there’s an ocean of students all over the world, especially in emerging markets, so why don’t you think about remote business models where you can leverage the human capital you have? I feel remote work now will extend across all the layers of our society, including all kinds of services. MATT:  That makes a lot of sense and it’d be powerful if it could happen. I know the distributed education experiments haven’t been as successful, at least the ones that I’ve seen yet. But it feels like if we can do work really well and be even more productive from a work point of view, learning should be part of that. RAJ:  Yes. And just one random thought. You mentioned what would be an interesting thing for CEOs to think about? I feel, just like the academic research in remote work is in its nascency, I feel the one area where we are still in nascency, and that’s just my view, is how we do our virtual communication. So be it Zoom or Google Hangouts or Microsoft Teams. So I feel there can be lots of imagination in how we organize our… how we conduct our virtual communication using VR, ER. So I feel that is one area where I would imagine there would be a lot of interesting things to work on and customize technology to the business models. A school might need different kinds of communication technology compared to a software company, compared to a manufacturing company. MATT:  And the software does make a huge different. It’s funny how… Automattic actually had very few meetings before we adopted Zoom because there were just… they weren’t very good. RAJ:  Yes, yeah. MATT:  People would talk over each other, it wasn’t very high quality, it would be laggy. And I don’t think it was fully a positive thing. I think the pendulum swung where we started doing too many meetings and we had to walk that back a little bit just because the tool afforded it. RAJ:  Yes. MATT:  I think a lot of folks are experiencing that right now where they’re on eight or ten hours of Zoom calls a day and that is not the same as being in a conference room for eight hours. It’s exhausting in a different fashion. RAJ:  Yes. And you’re totally right. So you know… and we talked about asynchronous, that just makes me feel that we need to celebrate asynchronous, we need to have… So Slack is a great tool, it’s a great improvement at least in my opinion. But it’s not the end of the world. I think we can put a lot of imagination in how to do asynchronous communication, but also synchronous communication. And I feel that is one area where I would urge people to think harder and be extremely creative. MATT:  Check out my “Five Levels of Distributed Autonomy” post. I really try to push to asynchronicity as the ultimate level. RAJ: Yes. MATT:  One thing I have also been trying to get people to do is to change the terminology, which I will introduce for your consideration. Which is remote implies that you are away from something and that there is a central. So I’m really trying to get people to move towards either distributed or decentralized as a way to describe this new form of work because you really want every node in the network to be at equal footing, not that there is a hub and spoke, like I think offshoring or near shoring or remote work has traditionally been tried. RAJ:  I like that. Yeah, no, you’re totally right. I think the thing I keep thinking about is of course we have had all these all-remote models, now we are having some large companies… So Dell is the other large company we didn’t talk about. They, as you probably know, they have been aggressively pushing distributed or remote work, whatever you may call it. But once we have a critical mass of companies being majority-remote, then we probably need a complete change in terminology because that will be the common paradigm and then the office might be the exception, right? MATT:  Yes, we need a word that says the office is the remote thing, not the… yeah. [laughter] You had mentioned… I actually didn’t know Dell was doing a ton of distributed work. That’s good to know because that’s kind of in my backyard, in Texas. You mentioned the H1B visas. I think some of the companies you mentioned, like TCS and Accenture, are the majority of those, right? RAJ:  That is true. But you know, we just got hold of this amazing data set on the I129 applications for the H1B. So there’s a completely, in my opinion, unscientific cap to the H1B visas. It’s 65,000 plus 20,000 every year. There’s no scientific basis for why it’s not 66,000 or 100,000 or why there should be any cap. And we have looked at the I129 applications, which is an order of magnitude more than 65,000. MATT: Can you define what that is really quick? RAJ:  So it’s an application to participation in the lottery. So there is a lottery. You have to pay $460, file this application, and then you are part of this annual lottery that the USCIS runs. MATT:  Is that the Green Card lottery or is it different? RAJ:  No, this is the H1B visa lottery. MATT:  Ohh gotcha, gotcha. RAJ:  They only give 65,000 H1B visas and additionally give 20,000 visas for people with a U.S. masters. But the number of applications to participate in the lottery is way more than 85,000. And if you look at the distribution of the company — MATT: What’s the number of total people who –– RAJ:  I want to say it’s upwards of 300,000 at least. MATT:  Wow, yeah. RAJ:  And you’d be surprised at how many manufacturing companies, U.S. manufacturing companies participate. There’s healthcare with lots of applications from the Philippines, so they try to… there is a large contingent of nurses coming in from Philippines. So it is not just these IT service companies. And I feel no one has done this study before and we are trying to do it now, no one has calculated the loss to American startups for not getting an H1B visa. Because you are participating in the lottery, if you really wanted a talented engineer and couldn’t get that person, you don’t have a subsidiary, like Microsoft or IBM, so you lost that person forever. What is the loss to a startup for losing out on the lottery? There is no study. And I think it’ll be a very interesting thing to at least document. MATT:  Politically what do you think will happen there, especially in an environment when unemployment in the U.S. is at historic highs? RAJ:  Your guess is as good as mine. [laughter] MATT:  What would you like to happen, I guess is a good question. RAJ:  I can tell you at least what is happening. So I feel that the Canada arbitrage model  is happening. And you might call that arbitrage, you might call that being just super smart, but they have figured this out. So in the U.S., the data, if you look at the data, the bulk of the immigrants who come into the country are coming in on a family reunification visa. And I have nothing against that, I think that is wonderful. But Canada, as a proportion of total visas, gives out a much larger share of work visas. And they have now found these ways to grant work visas in a super expedited way, even as quickly as two weeks. And there are startups which have negotiated special deals with the Canadian government saying we will find the best talent in the U.S. which is being asked to go home and we’ll move them to Canada, just give that person a visa within two weeks. So they receive the person in an airport, they do the exact same job as before, nothing has changed, but now they are paying property taxes and local taxes in Canada and not in the U.S. So that’s what’s going on right now. So I feel some… We need to pay attention to that from a policy perspective, the local economy perspective of the spillovers that we talked about in the U.S. MATT:  I think I saw that of the cities in North America that are growing, most of them are Canadian, which is funny because Canada itself is only like 38 million people. RAJ:  Yes. MATT:  But if these people are going to cities but cities are also desegregating a little bit because there’s more reasons to live in the suburbs, what happens to the benefits of cities as well? You hear about the creativity born of collisions or the environmental factors that make cities more efficient than when everybody is in the suburbs? RAJ:  That is an interesting question and I can speculate. I feel two things might happen. We might have more livable cities if a chunk of people move to the suburbs or even farther away. We might have much more livable and much more desirable cities. The cities might still act as a location for temporary collocated events, so even if everyone is spread out all over the country, or all over the world, you might want to do an event every quarter or every year where people come together and then you are not only showcasing new technologies, you are also very actively socializing. You may want to do that event in Hawaii as well, that’s totally understandable. [laughter] But I think there will also be an upgrade at least in the context of emerging markets on the physical infrastructure and the social infrastructure for the smaller towns, which is wonderful. Because you cannot move, in the case of India, one billion people to the cities, and in the case of large African countries, like Kenya or Nigeria, they have similar problems. So I feel the infrastructure and the quality of life will become better in the smaller towns. So you’ll see that and the cities might become more livable. So it might be a win-win for both cities and towns. MATT:  I have heard even in Manhattan and San Francisco, just with the people who left the cities because of the pandemic, to get out of the city, it has made everything a lot… It’s just taken a little bit of the pressure off the infrastructure. RAJ:  Sure, yes. MATT:  And for San Francisco, even, 50,000 people or 20,000 people would be pretty significant as a percentage. RAJ:  Yes, yes, exactly. MATT:  I guess we are also getting into one of the hardest problems of politics and morality, which is how big of a tent do you talk about? If someone is getting wage pressure on a downward level in San Francisco, yes, they can move within America but it’s helping these smaller cities all over the world. What is the moral compass and calculus there? RAJ:  It’s an incredibly important question to think about but I feel geography can be a great leveler in terms of creating opportunities and wages because there are lots of people… First of all, there’s decades of research on migration, which is documented that not everyone can move given tons of reasons. And we talked about decreasing mobility in the U.S. even in the past few decades. And even if you move your living conditions are probably much worse than if you had not moved. Right? MATT: Why is that? RAJ:  Think about the international migration that happens from all over South Asia into the Gulf. So these guys are going to work as construction workers or as restaurant workers, and they are probably making a decent wage, that’s why they’re going, but they’re sharing four people to a room. If you read some of the stories that have been documented about these migrants, it’s just terrible, right? MATT:  Yeah. RAJ:  Or the construction workers who move to cities to build these buildings and then move onto the next city and the next building. So I feel if they’re closer to home they not only have a better quality of life, they also have better social networks. So in places where there’s no insurance, social insurance safety net it’s much better to be closer to home because that is where your community or your friends are, your family is. And I feel geography can be a huge leveler in terms of improving economic outcomes and quality of life outcomes. MATT:  What should an enlightened government do there? Because, like you said, some of these stories of the migration, or the immigrant workers the Middle East, sound horrific. And they have I think in some countries even a majority of non-citizens in the country but conditions which sound like modern-day slavery. RAJ:  Yes, it’s a complex problem which doesn’t have one good answer for all sectors and all countries. So of course the construction workers have to move but if more construction work is moving back to other parts of the world, then they probably don’t have to move in the numbers they are moving right now. But in some sectors, you don’t need people to move if work becomes more distributed or what I call work from anywhere. And I feel it cannot be a subsidy solution that the government is taking care of everything. I feel the economic geography itself needs to correct for many of these frictions. And if the economic geography corrects for these frictions, then, on average, lives and quality of life will improve. MATT: And like you said, they could be closer to their families or social networks. And typically these visas are generally for solo people. RAJ:  That’s true, that’s exactly true. And so I’ll just give you one example. In China, I just finished this project, there is actually a visa, they don’t call it a visa, but there is an administrative document called a hukou, which needs to be transferred if you are moving from a small town to Beijing or Shanghai. So every person in China gets a hukou at birth and it’s tied to the location of birth and if you are not able to move that hukou to a large city then you don’t get healthcare in the large city and your kids can’t go to school there. So what the Chinese economy has done for several decades now has leveraged, actually, the hukou to make sure that these migrant workers come and work for a few months. So they come in July to these coastal cities and they stay till mid-January, just before the Chinese New Year and then they clear out, they all go back because they have no incentive to live permanently. So the kids are all left behind, the kids are being taken care of by the grandparents, and there is actually a whole generation of kids which has got into tremendous problems. And I read somewhere Jack Ma talking about this generation of left-behind kids, fixing their lives is going to be one of his priorities going ahead for the rest of his career. So I feel we have introduced so many frictions to people’s lives by forcing them to move. And now, if work from anywhere becomes truly a phenomena these Chinese workers don’t have to come every July to the coastal cities, then they can stay where they are, the kids are benefited, they are benefitted, the local economy is benefitted, I think it’s going to be an awesome thing over all. MATT:  What else is going on globally that you’re excited about? Should every city in the U.S. be doing something like the Tulsa experiment or if everyone does it does that negate Tulsa’s ability to attract better talent there? RAJ: No, I feel we are far away from the equilibrium. So I know Vermont did something similar two years back. The Tulsa experiment was actually done by the George Kaiser Foundation. So it was a private initiative. And my understanding is there’s some discussions going on with the government now to say that if indeed the remote workers come and stay for a period of time there will be some sort of compensation that the government will pay because it’s getting taxes. But the state of Vermont did something very similar. And I’m just excited about this, Matt. I feel we need experiments to try to get people back to Detroit, you name your favorite small town in the U.S. I feel we need both government as well as private-capital enthusiasm to make this a bigger movement. The equilibrium is decades ahead of us, I think. MATT:  What do you think it will do to the tax base in places like California? RAJ:  Sure, so there will be changes but I’m sure like… And I’ll tell you one thing that I’m studying right now in India, it’s a very interesting story. So in India, they don’t have a hukou, they don’t need a document to move from one place to the other, but there is something called a ration card and the ration card essentially entitles you to subsidized food, which is a huge deal for these migrant workers. And it has not been possible for several years now to make ration cards portable across India. So ration cards are given based on where you are born and if you move to a different city or a different state you don’t get subsidized food because the ration card is not portable. And the main reason it’s not portable is that fiscal transfers between states — so the state that is experiencing a migrant, or receiving the migrant, is saying why should we pay that migrants subsidized food? That state, the home state should pay us a fiscal transfer. So taxes would be a similar thing. But I feel if there’s enough private companies doing this there will be government action following it and that’s what’s happening in Tulsa. They have been successful for two years and now the state of Oklahoma, and just given what’s happening with the oil economy there, they are now talking. So I feel policy makers will only engage if there is enough private companies engaging in these initiatives. MATT:  Do we end up in a place where cities really have to compete on quality of life? RAJ:  That would be a good thing, right? So I feel if people have more choice and on average if the quality of life is improving across cities…  So one of the books that I got hooked on years back was Hillbilly Elegy. It just opened my eyes to what middle America is. And it broke my heart, like many others. So I feel we need… and now with work from anywhere we have a mechanism, which is elegant and it’s a win-win for the company and the worker, which has an impact on society and smaller towns. So I’m personally super excited about this. MATT:  Cool. If there is an executive listening to this who agrees with you or is seeing that productivity is down in this pandemic, work from pandemic environment, versus work from anywhere, what would you encourage them to look for as things open back up?  It sounds like you would encourage them to stick with it anyway. RAJ:  Yes. And I would actually encourage them to think really hard not as an HR policy but think about what remote work, or let’s call it distributed work or work from anywhere, could do for the company’s strategy. And what I mean by that tangibly is what does it mean for having a better hiring policy where you can now hire globally, what does it mean for if you are a CFO, what does it mean for staring at an empty office for three months and what it tells you about the value of that incremental marginal office campus you were planning to build, what does it mean for women in the workforce, what does it mean for career continuity of people? So I feel it’s a great opportunity for us to engage in these conversations and have these conversations at the C Suite and not at the HR manager level. MATT:  Well I think that’s a really powerful place to wrap things up. Raj, thank you so, so, so much. If people, as I expect they will, want to hear more from you, where can they find you? RAJ:  So I have my HBS website and my twitter handle is @prithwic. MATT:  Cool. Well, you’ve got a new follower here. And I can’t wait to see what other research you’ve found. And if myself or Automattic can ever be of help there, please let me know. RAJ:  Absolutely, Matt, I look forward to staying in touch.

Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. Is working from home a breakthrough for introverts? The answer, of course, is not so simple. Matt Mullenweg’s latest Distributed conversation is with Morra Aarons-Mele, host of The Anxious Achiever podcast for HBR Presents from Harvard Business Review, and founder of award-winning social impact agency Women Online and its database of women influencers, The Mission List. She’s also the author of Hiding in the Bathroom: How to Get Out There (When You’d Rather Stay Home). To learn more about Aarons-Mele’s work, go to womenandwork.org. The full episode transcript is below. (Intro Music) MATT MULLENWEG:  You are listening to Distributed with me, Matt Mullenweg. Today’s guest is Morra Aarons-Mele. Morra is the founder of Women Online, an award-winning social impact agency, and she is also the author of “Hiding In the Bathroom: How to Get Out There When You’d Rather Stay At Home.”  A title I love. [laughs] It’s a book that rethinks introversion in the workplace. Interested to hear about her experiences so I can learn more about how Automattic can better serve the many introverts on distributed teams and talk about the theory that maybe distributed is better for introverts. So, welcome, Morra. MORRA AARONS-MELE:  Hi, Matt. How are you? MATT:  Thank you so much for joining. And where are you joining from today just out of curiosity? MORRA: Right outside Boston. MATT:  Cool. I’m in Houston, Texas. MORRA:  All right. MATT:  I celebrated 100 days here yesterday which is my longest I’ve been here in a long time. MORRA:  Oh my gosh. [laughter] MATT:  So we had a very brief introduction there but what brought you to this topic? MORRA:  Uh, life. [laughter] I didn’t know that I was an introvert with social anxiety, I think that’s an important piece of it, which we can talk about as well, until I was about 35 years old. I would never have wanted to be an introvert when I was younger because I didn’t really know what being an introvert meant. I was really ambitious and I worked in sales and marketing and I talk a lot, I’m not shy. And so I remember even taking a Myers-Briggs once in graduate school and sort of gaming it so that I could be as extroverted as possible because I felt like I should be extroverted, you know? MATT: How did you game it? What answers did you change? MORRA: All the answers that are about… This is 16 years ago so I’m… but you know, the answers that are leading you to the E about your interaction style and do you like to be in big groups and all that. Anyway, so it never occurred to me. But what did happen to me was I was just often really, really unhappy at all my jobs. And I had a lot of jobs. I quit a lot of jobs. I hated office politics. I would get really good jobs but because I was sort of preferring to not be in the ring I would get layered over real quick. And then I finally quit my last job for good and started freelancing. And it’s like this lightbulb went off when I was sitting at my kitchen table doing the same work I had always done but by myself on my own time, in my own lighting. I was like, “ohhh this is for me.” And as I spent more time working for myself and learning about work styles and workplace flexibility, I began to read up and realized I am really introverted and I have really intense social anxiety and I have been working in an entirely wrong way for many years. MATT: If it’s worth it, do you mind defining what an introvert is for people and maybe what social anxiety is just so we’re working from the same set of assumptions? MORRA: Yes. The thing about being an introvert is there is no blood test. So you could probably talk to a bunch of different people and they would say different things. And it’s funny because over the years I’ve had people email me and say you’re not an introvert, you’re a highly sensitive person. You’re not an introvert, you have ADHD. This all may be true but the thing about being an introvert is it’s actually not about whether you are shy, whether you’re quiet, whether you are… some people think you’re socially awkward if you’re an introvert. It’s really about how you manage your energy and what kind of situations fill you with energy versus drain you. So this is… I think a lot of people know being… engaging with a lot of people, giving a lot of output all day, getting a lot of stimulus back can be really hard for introverts. It’s hard for most people frankly, but introverts just do not get energy from that constant being on with the people in collaboration. And we are also usually very sensitive to other kinds of stimuli, so lights, noise. If you walk into any modern hotel and it’s full of bright lights and a million different cable channels as well as music piped over the loudspeaker and you want to close your eyes and hide in a dark closet, you might be an introvert. MATT:  The energy part has always been hard for me because I… Like, I love seeing people so much but sometimes I do feel really worn out at the end of the day, but I’m not sure if that’s because it was a great day or that was draining my energy. MORRA:  I mean that’s the thing, right? I think that even extroverts probably at the end of a long day with a lot of people are drained but they would choose to go back the next day whereas most introverts probably wouldn’t. When we gear ourselves up for something like that it tends to be more performative, it’s something that we have to prepare for, something that we have to get ready for, something that we have to rehearse. And a lot of introverts are performers. Some of our most famous performers, like Oprah and Lady Gaga and people who get up and literally own a stadium are hugely introverted. And this means that when they’re out there, they are giving it their all, they love it, but it is very much about gathering the energy and performing. It may not be a natural switch. You’ll also talk to a lot of introverts and they’ll say, you know, I can go give a speech in front of 3,000 people, no problem, but if I have to mingle afterwards that’s it, I instantly feel drained. MATT:  Did you just say that Oprah and Lady Gaga are introverts? MORRA: Mhm. MATT:  Wow. MORRA:  Yeah, yeah. MATT:  Mind blown. Today I learned. [laughter] MORRA:  Oprah actually likes to hide in the bathroom to get away from people. MATT:  Wow. You mentioned social anxiety. Do you mind defining that for us? MORRA:  Social anxiety is a learned trait. So introversion is something that we’re naturally born probably one way or the other, although I think it ebbs and flows given your life experience and your life stage. But people might naturally be introverted if they prefer quiet, if they like to be by themselves, if a great day for them involves being with fewer people versus being with more people. Society anxiety is a learned behavior and it is when you actually fear social interaction and that could be with one other person or it could be a group. It is that experience of walking into a room and feeling like you don’t belong there, everyone hates you, you’re going to make a fool of yourself, it’s really about shame. Ellen Hendrickson, who is one of my favorite psychologists on this subject, calls it the fear of the reveal. So if you’re listening and you think about a time when you walked into — back when we had networking events —  a networking event and you felt like you were a total fraud and that you were scared to open your mouth and talk to people because you definitely did not belong in that room, that’s social anxiety. It can come from being ashamed when you’re a kid, it can come from being criticized if you are a quiet introvert for not talking enough. There’s a lot of reasons why we become socially anxious but it’s really about shame. MATT:  I didn’t realize that one was learned and one you were kind of born with. MORRA:  I mean, I’m not a scientist, but most of the literature would say that introversion is more of a character trait. And the same way that some people really love music and love to work to music and some people need quiet, I think of it like that. You know? It’s just who you are. Whereas social anxiety… Of course there are some people who are more genetically anxious, etcetera, it could be epigenetic, but it tends to stem from learned behavior over time. MATT:  What would you say is the prevalence in society, do we know a percentage for introversion or social anxiety? MORRA:  You’ll hear it all over the map. Anxiety is very, very prevalent. Up to about a third of adults have some sort of anxiety disorder at some point. Introversion, I’ve heard 40% of the population, I’ve heard 30%. Again, it’s on a continuum. So I would think it’s probably between 30% and 40%. But of course a lot of people convince themselves they’re not introverts so they would never admit or they wouldn’t even know they were. MATT:  And that was you at some point, right? MORRA: Mhm. MATT:  So if 30% of the population — let’s just go with the lowest — is introverted, why are offices designed like they are? MORRA:  Where do we start? [laughter] I think work sucks, the way that most knowledge work places… Actually, the way that most workplaces are set up… Even I see my kids in school, there is such an emphasis on team and collaboration and performance from an early age, it’s really, really ingrained. I think it’s a very western thing. It’s very American. We have a very old-fashioned view of leadership. It is still based on command and control and usually a white guy in front of the room telling us all what to do. And one thing that I think all the white guys who used to run the world — no offense, Matt — is they liked their people close, they liked proximity so that they could work hierarchically and tell people what to do and then gather everyone together and rally the troops. I’m using a  lot of quasi-military language, I realize, but I think that’s intentional. And so the office really comes out of that model. It is this hierarchical leadership model where being present means you are committed, you are going to go and report to whoever is in charge, be at their beck and call, which they think means just seeing you, it’s not really that they are engaged, it’s just that they are there. And a lot of leaders over time got to be lazy and think ehh, I just want my people here so I can get them to do what I want. I really think it’s just the old models are really slow to die. MATT:  Well there’s probably a lot of CEOs listening that don’t relate to what you just described and I can speak personally that I’ve had impostor syndrome sometimes over the years being like, well, why don’t I travel with an entourage everywhere I go [laughs] like some of these other CEOs I know? And it’s like uhh.. I think there’s some very different models that can be successful. MORRA:  100%, 100%. And again, a lot of the workforce, even before the pandemic, was distributed. I think though that it is the stereotypes, the reality is different but I think that the stereotypes die hard. I think you see it especially in sales and marketing cultures where there is this sense of being present and being on as a sign of being committed.  And I think also that it’s all down to communication. Communication is not most managers’ strong suit because we’re not taught how to be effective communicators and to be in touch with our feelings and other people’s feelings. And I’d love to hear your thoughts. I think when your team is distributed and you can’t just gather them in a room, you have to communicate better. Right? You have to rely on different models. And that’s hard work and so a lot of people just don’t want to do that. MATT:  Yes, I’ve been thinking a lot about that it’s… It’s not even being distributed or not or centralized or not but the way meetings, the structure of a meeting tends to reward people who do well in meetings. And a meeting is usually a means to an end. Right? It’s to solve a problem for a customer or it’s a… it’s to have some outcome. And there are other ways to get that same outcome. MORRA:  100%. MATT:  I think meetings encourage a lot of reaction, so we’re responding in real time versus considering something, thinking about it, editing it. And there is a ton of research already about who speaks up or who is most present in meetings. MORRA:  Well and I’ve seen research, and I think this is true, that introverts, we are not as good on the fly. We actually prefer the time to digest and sit with our thoughts. And social anxiety, which a lot of introverts have, is also a real hindrance to performing, what did you say? Doing well in a meeting, being good at meetings. And so yes, the way that meetings are set up, the way that a lot of work is set up is really hard on people who think differently. And I always tell introverts who are in a lot of meetings speak early, just say something, it doesn’t have to be earth-shattering, because then you have registered your presence and you are not going to get that look at the end of the meeting of “hmm, Julie, you haven’t said anything, do you have anything to add?” Which is totally, you know… MATT:  Which, by the way, is taught as a best practice. MORRA:  Yes. MATT:  So I do try to… If I feel like someone is really hanging back in the meeting or it’s being dominated by a few people I try to make a space for the folks who might be quieter. But that probably also might be a little terrifying, you know? MORRA:  I don’t like it. I think it’s a team thing, it’s an individual thing, and it’s… I think also if your folks know that you’re introverted they might respond differently if you ask them to talk because they’re like “oh, he gets it.” I think often though it can make people feel like they are being treated like a child and it turns the whole spotlight onto you at the end of the meeting and really can set all those shame bombs, like “why didn’t I say anything, oh my god, they’re going to think I’m dumb, I’m definitely not getting that promotion.” It can really set the ruminating in motion. So I am in general not a fan. It is hard to shut people down though who take up a lot of room. MATT:  Yes. What do you recommend then? Because I have definitely seen it as well where there might be gender differences. Often men talk a lot more in these meetings. And so just trying to make room for maybe the not even introverts but just people who don’t have as much room to speak if you just let the meeting dynamic continue uninterrupted. MORRA:  I think it’s better to keep it general. Like you said, you could say, “You know, let’s hear from some folks who haven’t talked,” because that also shuts down the talkers rather than picking on people individually. But I also think it’s always worth a one-on-one check-in afterwards because one of the other things that I have learned in my journey is that if you have social anxiety you might talk and blurt out a lot of things that you may regret and that’s your anxiety talking. And so it’s really good for everyone to get meeting feedback from a trusted boss, colleague, you know? Meetings are so essential in so many workplaces, and we’re never taught how to be good in a meeting, that I think it’s worth it to say you know, I loved your ideas but maybe make room for other people. Again, that’s hard to say. MATT:  It’s been one of the things… I’ve been speaking a lot to executives who have unexpectedly moved to distributed. And I have this framework where I talk about the different levels and the highest levels when you can move to be asynchronous. And what has resonated a lot with these typically very extroverted executives is that you can unlock the genius of the introverts in your company. There’s 30% or 40% of your people who aren’t served by your environments or by the meeting structures and there’s a lot of wisdom and intelligence in that 30% or 40%. And in some companies, tech companies, I would argue it’s maybe even higher. MORRA:  That’s right. So what do good CEOs do? MATT:  I think a lot about the structures. So we just had actually a really interesting conversation that I found very tactically useful about how to compensate to make a meeting a little better and if that’s something I thought was maybe helping might have been worse for some people. So, a good example of that. But maybe it’s the concept of the meeting existing in the first place which is the problem. MORRA:  I think that introverts like to prepare and so if you feel like you have talent that is locked up… And so much talent is locked up not even because of introversion but, like you said, because of race, because of gender, because of frankly men who have always just BS’d their way through life and gotten rewarded for it — and women too — who just think that if they talk a lot that’s them being smart. And so thinking about how to unlock people who aren’t getting a word in is really important. And I do think that a lot of introverts are really great at presenting, they just need to be given the platform and time to prepare. A lot of it is about our obsession with brain storming and being spontaneous. So you can try write-storming instead of brainstorming because brainstorming and big conversation favors people who are comfortable at just jumping in and taking a lot of space. MATT:  It can be fun when it goes well. MORRA:  Oh yeah. MATT:  But it’s a skill which is orthogonal from actual wisdom or intelligence about whatever the problem set is. So I guess our solution there is trying to make it asynchronous. Most of our collaboration happens on internal blogging systems where people can respond. And the design of these systems tries to put the words first. It’s really about the writing, not about the avatar who is saying it or things like that. That still is there so it doesn’t remove it but… And we even take this all the way back to our hiring process. So we will do most hiring just on chat. MORRA:  Wow. MATT:  There will be no audio or video real-time communication. MORRA:  That is super interesting to me. Yes, that’s interesting. MATT:  Well you probably have a lot of folks… Well, most people are not working in companies that are asynchronous, including parts of Automattic are not asynchronous. What’s your advice for them? And you yourself, you have some podcasts, you’re a public speaker, there’s probably a lot of introverts hearing you share your story and being like, wow, I wish I could be more like her because she seems such a natural to all this. MORRA:  Yes, no one ever believes I’m an introvert. I mean for me, I just say it’s just practice and it’s building in structure and boundaries. I think coming back to the Oprah example, Oprah for many years would come into our lives every day at 4PM and carry us in a way that was a gift.  You’d never think that this is someone who is happiest on her own and needs to hide in the bathroom to get space. So I think what’s really important to remember is that introversion is about energy and managing your boundaries. And everything, every work should be about that, frankly. I think we should treat everybody like they are introverts, especially now, because remote work is draining in a whole other way that we can talk about. Understand what people need in terms of preparation to give it their best, understand the space that they need — if they need you to say, “you know what, Matt is going to take ten minutes now and share some thoughts.” Understand how their day flows and so don’t book a ton of back-to-back meetings so that people can catch a breath and get some alone time in between. Understand their boundaries, like video calling might be really, really hard for a lot of introverts so maybe mix it up with asynchronous stuff, text-based, phone with no video and video. MATT:  You mentioned the challenges of remote work. I’d love to hear your thoughts there. MORRA:  Well I have a lot of thoughts. [laughs] MATT:  What would be the categories that you think — MORRA:  I’m sure you do too. I’ve run my… I had a small company of ten people but we have always been remote as well. So I have been working remotely since 2006, so for many years. And I think that you’ve obviously invested years and years of thought and infrastructure and systems to creating a successful remote workplace, right? As have I. You can’t just approach remote work the way that you might approach that present office system. I think that again we’re sort of lazy in that we just take one schedule and slap it onto remote so we think, well, if we had the 2PM meetings on Wednesdays back then we’re going to have the 2PM meeting on Wednesdays now and it’s going to be Zoom. Right? MATT:  Yes and it will always be video and it will always… yes. MORRA:  Why? It will always be video. And again, the same things happen but the problem with video and remote meetings is that you… Even the biggest introvert is going to get some kind of buzz by being with people. We’re human, that’s who we are, we pick up on other people. And so we get none of the good stuff in remote meetings and all the bad stuff. We have all the anxiety, we have all the talking over, we have all the stressors to people who don’t like that environment and yet none of the comfort of sitting near your friend or having a donut or getting people’s energy. MATT:  Yes. Sometimes I wonder, and I have felt this, where if you had said, “oh, you get to stay home for a while,” I would’ve been, like, “great!” And now I’m wondering if I’m getting too much of a good thing and maybe losing some of the practice of being around people. MORRA:  Exactly. [laughs] I always call it chunking, chunking your time or pacing your work. I think that the introverts that I know who do it really well have a really good sense of their ideal pace. And they build in a lot of infrastructure and a lot of downtime. And so I think that’s what we’re all responding to is that now we are all separate and we’re all trying to figure out the new rules of work and we don’t have any of the comforts of coming together. And so if it’s possible and you’re listening to take a step back and think about jeez, what is that cadence? Do I want to see people twice a week, ideally, and then have three days where I’m just working remotely? Do I want to have one day where I’m not accountable to anybody else, I have no meetings, I have no Zooms, I can just work? And then do I want to have one day where I am in meetings with everybody all day and we do have a big collaborative, fun meeting? It’s awesome to be able to take a step back, if you can, and really think about the pace of your interactions and the types of interactions. MATT:  It seems like a precondition for a lot of the things you’re describing is a level of self-awareness. MORRA:  Yes. MATT:  How do you cultivate that self-awareness? I think certainly in the past I’m just not aware of my energy, whether it’s high or low, and I kind of realize after I crash or too late. MORRA:  You play detective. [laughs] I have a friend, Rebecca Harley, who is a psychologist at Mass General Hospital here in Boston and she calls it playing detective, really starting to tune in. And this is what I believe so deeply and why I also believe that any of the best-selling self-optimization or leadership bibles in the world won’t do you a lick of good until you have that self-awareness. Because so many of us spend our entire work lives reacting, getting triggered by things we don’t know are triggering us, and then reacting in ways that we don’t know, whether it’s pushing ourselves too hard and then crashing, or getting extremely anxious about something, reacting in a negative way, and then wondering why things went wrong. So until you understand what makes you tick in terms of your energy, in terms of your anxieties, in terms of your dark thoughts and demons and fears and insecurities, I don’t think you can be your best work self. And it start with tuning in, it starts with actually going through your day and thinking, Wow, why after that conversation do I feel like I need to take a nap? God, that conversation really made me feel like I want to cry and I want to take a nap. Or, why am I over work is a really common, anxious reaction. We think it’s a good thing because again we get rewarded for it but why is there always that one boss or that one client who you just work, work, work, work for even though they don’t need it? What’s triggering you? Start paying attention. When does your neck ache? Why does your jaw ache?  When does your breathing get tight? If you see a certain person’s name in your inbox and all of a sudden…  We’ve all had that feeling, right? MATT:  Yes. We did an interesting hack where we… Next to the posting box on our internal blogging system, which is called P2, it shows a random oblique strategy. It’s one of the things from Brian Eno. But on Reddit I heard they started to put a message that said ‘relax your jaw’ which actually… I hadn’t really thought about it but it is so nice that if you relax your jaw… So much of this experiences somatically in the body. MORRA:  100%. MATT:  But we are very turned off to that.  Have you heard of the HALT acronym? MORRA:  No. MATT:  Oh, I like this one a lot. HALT stands for hunger, anger, loneliness, and tiredness. Just if you find yourself feeling bad or reacting a certain way just ask yourself those four questions — am I hungry? No? Am I angry, am I lonely, am I tired? Just going through it as a check-in. And I’m sure there’s a million different versions of this, including meditation and others, that allow that check-in. In engineering we say you have to profile before you can optimize, which just means you have to see where the bottlenecks are in the system before you start trying to fix them. MORRA:  See, now there you go because again Alice Boyes, who is a great psychologist, who does a lot of work on anxiety and tool kits says every person who tends toward a bit of anxiety has anxiety bottlenecks. And this could be the same for anything, you could have introversion bottlenecks where… For me, because I am in client services, there’s many times where I’ll fly to a city and I’ll have just days of meetings and I’ll reach that point at 5:00 where I’m just so done but I still have to go to dinner with someone. And that’s my bottleneck and I need a solution. And so yes, you have to understand the cause and then the reaction and the space between is meditation, that’s all meditation is, is having awareness in the space between the cause and reaction. And so what Reddit is doing basically is actually a little bit of a meditation, of mindfulness. It’s saying oh, are you clenching your jaw? Relax it. But then the next question is why am I clenching my jaw? MATT:  Totally. And has some form of meditation or mindfulness been a part of your journey? MORRA:  Yes. I’m not a good meditator, I’m not a formal… I don’t do a lot of long meditations or anything like that. I think for me it’s really about the mindfulness and trying to spot my reactions. What was most powerful for me as a small business owner was understanding how much money triggered anxiety in me. And I mean talk about jaw clenching, I would get migraines if I got stressful financial news because I would clench. Or being in a negotiation with a client. I was so triggered by money because money is an issue for me, it’s an anxiety for me, that I was making bad decisions, I was reacting in bad ways. I’d get migraines. And so even just understanding, to be a little mindful. Like, okay, Morra, you know what, there is a pandemic and you’re going to go look at your forecast and instead of going down a spiral of anxiety, like “we’re going broke, we’re never going to survive, everything is coming to an end,” breathe, do it with your colleagues so you’re not feeling so alone. Just building a technique, that kind of mindfulness has been life changing for me. MATT:  Thank you for sharing that because, well, one, that’s an interesting one to share and two, I think money is actually a big one for a lot of people. MORRA:  Oh yes. MATT:  I’ve seen it in people I know who are actually quite wealthy. MORRA:  Oh yes. MATT:  And then you get both an anxiety around money and a guilt around that you shouldn’t be anxious around money because logically they are past that point. MORRA:  It’s not rational. It’s not rational. And I think also just the space of saying it’s not rational [laughs] is really good. Getting distance. But again, it all comes back to self-awareness. I mean that’s why I think every leader should be in therapy as well. I think it’s so key to your leadership. MATT:  Is there a type of therapy people should be in, or leaders should be in? MORRA:  Well, there’s so many different kinds of therapy but I think talk therapy, not coaching. I think coaching is incredible but I think a lot of leaders really need to go to the fundamentals of what’s driving them down deep. And people tend to want to solve things, we are all about solving and optimizing, but there has to be a little bit of time to un-peel the mess. MATT:  Actually even in my question I was solving things because I was like, well what type?  [laughter]  And really probably almost anything is better than nothing if you’re just dealing with self-inquiry. MORRA:  Well that’s right. And a lot of people will say well I’m going to sign up for ten sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy because my health plan covers it and it’s useful. And some people might say I’m at a place in my life where I’m going to go do analysis three times a week and I’m finally going to work on some big stuff. So it’s very personal. But I guess what I would say is it’s really about feeling your feelings, which is not something that we get taught much at work. MATT:  Before we get too much into anxiety, I did want to ask a little bit more about introverts and extroverts. MORRA:  Yes. MATT:  This is kind of a two-sided question. What is something that you really wish that extroverts understood about introverts and then on the other side what’s something you wish introverts had empathy for in extroverts? MORRA:  Well I’m married to an extrovert so I have had so much practice. [laughs] MATT:  Perfect answer. MORRA:  Oh my god. So I would say that there is a lot of judgment on either side. And a couple is actually a great way to think about this because an introvert/extrovert couple might have the same argument every once in a while which is the extrovert says, “you never want to see anyone, I’m bored. Why can’t we have people over? Why can’t we go out? You never want to do this. Every weekend you just want to stay home and watch Netflix.” And then they are frustrated, they’re not getting what they want. And the introvert is saying “why are you always making me see people? I’m tired, I am with people all week long, all I want to do is stay in and watch Netflix and hang out with you.” And neither person is getting what they want. So I think it’s really understanding what the other person needs and it’s not a personal judgement. It’s not about you. It doesn’t mean that I don’t like you because I don’t want to talk on the phone, it’s because I really cherish my quiet time and my alone time and I don’t get a lot of it. So can we meet in the middle and find a place or a time where we can connect that it’s meaningful for both of us? Or, can I have a deal with my husband where we get to go out twice a month and the other two weekends we’re home. Or I have a 90-minute rule when we used to go out to dinner where he loves to go out to dinner, he loves to be with people, and I was allowed to leave after 90 minutes and he could find his own way home. [laughs] So again, you have to be willing to compromise and just talk things through. MATT:  Ahh. Those are again some very practical tips. I like it. MORRA:  Thanks. MATT:  You mentioned on your podcast page that anxiety is normal. Why do you think that needs to be said? MORRA:  First of all, of course anxiety is normal because anxiety is good. Anxiety is what kept our species going and now keeps us performing and keeps us working hard and trying and getting jazzed with energy before we give a talk. So anxiety at a normal, healthy, manageable level is really good. I think that we think… again we, who is we? In success culture, in this culture that many of us who have come up in business subscribe to, we think that anything that has to do with mental health is bad and weak. And so we don’t want to let weakness show. And so admitting we are anxious many people would think is akin to saying I’m not in control, I am weak, and I can’t do this, or you’re going to think I can’t do this and that’s dangerous. And so people shy away from it. MATT:  One thing I have heard from colleagues is that they don’t want to be perceived as other people need to walk on eggshells around them. MORRA: Mhm. MATT:  I don’t know if that resonates with you, or there’s maybe a reason they are scared to share it or when they shared it they regretted it a little bit. MORRA: You know, it’s funny, I hear that a lot and I’m reflecting now because my husband and I, one of our fights as a couple is he will say to me, “well I didn’t want to tell you because  of your anxiety.” And I’ll say, “my anxiety doesn’t make me unable to hear bad news or not be able to help you when you’re in a crisis. My anxiety is something that I am in conversation with and I can manage, it’s not your responsibility to hide things from me.” And so yes, I think there is that perception but that’s why it’s important to say that anxiety is normal because anxiety doesn’t make us weak, anxiety is a human reaction. And if we can understand it and be in conversation with it and manage it there’s nothing bad about it. It’s when we aren’t in touch that we are acting out of control. MATT:  When you said that, I thought of my relationship with my mom. MORRA: Oh, why? MATT:  Well sometimes I’m hesitant to tell her things because I feel like she will worry about it more than I will. So for me it might last an hour, for her it might last several days. And I feel like it’s putting an undue burden on her. MORRA:  Have you ever asked her? MATT:  Yes. [laughs] MORRA:  Oh okay, well maybe it is. MATT:  Well she likes to know though, just like you said. MORRA: Yeah, yeah. MATT:  She of course loves me and wants to be supportive. MORRA:  And she’s your mom. MATT:  And she’s my mom. [laughs] That too. So what can companies do either in one-to-one relationships, like manages and colleagues, or maybe structurally? MORRA:  I think structurally the good news about what’s happening now is that companies have to look at what’s working and what’s not working, and so that’s really good. I pray that many companies will achieve some sort of hybrid model that gives introverts and people who frankly just don’t want to commute for hours a day, etcetera, space to work at home if they can, or work wherever they want that isn’t going into an office. But also understand that a lot of people do value human connection. There is a way to do it. Really, again, it’s about mindfulness. I think companies can be mindful about how they program work, right? What the company model is for scheduling calls, what the mandatory office hours are, what a meeting culture looks like. I think that starting with meetings could be so powerful for so many organizations — how do we run a good meeting, what does this look like, who talks when, what are the criteria for scheduling a meeting? You hear a lot about Amazon, of course, and their process, but I think there is something to that. It’s just about being more mindful. I wish that every team would sit together and talk about their work styles and their boundaries and, you know, when you email me on Saturday morning it really freaks me out and I wish that we could have a policy where we wouldn’t send emails on the weekend unless it was super urgent, is that possible? Where people can ask for what they need and organizations can respond mindfully. MATT:  It sounds like what you’re saying is that if we do these things it should help everyone, not just the anxious people, who might not know or not whether someone’s anxious. MORRA:  And not just the introverts. There is a classic, classic example that Leslie Perlow, who is a professor at Harvard Business School, who has studied time use and always-on culture, talks about, which is… And this has nothing to do with anxiety or personality at all. Think about… I love to clear out emails on Saturday mornings. It’s just a really great time for me. So think about me feeling awesome, having her coffee, clearing out emails on a Saturday morning and on the receiving end is my colleague who is at his kid’s soccer game and who picks up his phone and all the sudden has 10 emails from his boss. And he feels like crap. You have just ruined his soccer game. Because you just haven’t thought… right? MATT:   Hmm. Yeah. I wish every messaging platform had time shifting. It’s one of my biggest wishes for Slack. MORRA:  Honestly I think Slack is really, really dangerous because there aren’t boundaries built in. At least with most email these days you can schedule. Slack creates such an always-on expectation that I worry, I do worry because it erodes our mental health to have to always, always be watched by that little message app. MATT:  The good news  is that’s not technically difficult. They have a lot of the things in there and they try to make the controls I think more on the receiving end where you don’t get notifications. But… MORRA:  But it’s a cultural thing. Because if no one else on your team uses them, well, you’re not going to be the only one. MATT:  Well and I also found that, particularly as an executive or if you’re an executive listening to this, it doesn’t matter how many times they say you don’t need a response after hours, if people get the message they do and they feel like they should. And so I have really… I actually just started keeping a text file where… On some platforms, like Telegram, I can schedule the message to go out next day, during normal hours, but otherwise I just keep a text file and I put it all in the text file and try to get to it the next day. Although in an asynchronous organization you don’t always know when people are working or what their normal hours are. MORRA:  Well that’s right, and you have people all over the world, right? MATT:  24-7, yes. So I’m receiving messages actually 24 hours a day. MORRA:  Well how do you keep those boundaries for yourself? MATT:  I just don’t look at it. But I’m also the boss, so… MORRA:  But you’re the boss, yeah. MATT:  So I think that that is a way to… I feel more comfortable doing that. But I will say, even as the boss, I consider myself at service to everyone in the organization. So if I see an unread message from someone who I know is going through a tough time or something, or a difficult situation, I am probably going to open it, even if it’s after hours or I shouldn’t, because I think well maybe I can just do a quick response that will unblock something. So there is a pressure that comes to leaders as well who want to be empathetic or don’t want to be a bottleneck. MORRA: I mean, that’s the thing, we are human and we’re trying to master all these different kinds of communication that just want more from us. But I think a good place to start, if you’re listening, is just to think about… It’s sort of like tuning in and playing detective… is to think about that feeling of a boundary being crossed. You may answer that email from a colleague and it may make you feel really good, even if it’s Saturday night at 11:00, because you care for that colleague, you’re reaching out, you feel like a good leader. That’s great, right? You’re not crossing a boundary for yourself. The Saturday morning on the soccer field is crossing a boundary for him because all of a sudden he is sent into a state of anxiety — my boss needs me, why am I out on the soccer field when she is working, am I not doing a good enough job, is that what…? He is sent into a very heightened state of uncomfortable arousal. So I think that is a very good place to start is what is my team, what is my boss, what are my colleagues, what are we doing that makes me have that Spidey sense that this is a little too far for me and I’m not comfortable with it. MATT:  So we are in a very unique situation right now — the first global pandemic I have lived through. And depending on how you feel about it, there is a virus, there is a silent killer moving through our midst and a lot of people are experiencing anxiety that maybe weren’t aware of it before or maybe hadn’t felt it before. So as someone who covers this area, what would be your advice to folks who are feeling maybe new to anxiety, what would you recommend for them? MORRA:  To say I’m anxious, this is hard, and to not try to shut down the feeling. It is so tempting to, especially if this is your first time or it’s something that you don’t want to feel, to just try to move on. But I think right now it is really important to say okay, yes, there is a global pandemic, I am anxious, here is why, and then to understand that A, that is completely normal, who isn’t anxious right now? The world is… whoa. And I am not alone, my peers feel this way, the people I respect most in the world feel this way, the people who work for me feel this way. And so what do I need to do? What do I need to do? What especially is driving me? And there is a great exercise that I have written about and I have talked about this on the podcast but it’s a real instant calmer-downer if you are having a bout of anxiety, right away. It’s from Jerry Colonna and he calls it “the possible versus the probable.” So oh my gosh, there’s a virus, it’s a silent killer, everyone I love is going to die. Is that possible? That’s possible. It is possible. Is it probable? No. The statistics are very limited, here is how I’m keeping my family safe, here is how we’re safe, here is how we are going to continue to stay safe. You can do this with your business if you are worried about going out of business and all these fears that we have now. But this is where we are at but we can’t stuff these feelings under the rug. MATT:  I love that framework of possible versus probable. MORRA: Yes. MATT:  What I use sometimes is, is the anxiety serving me? MORRA:  Mmm. MATT:  Is it helping me find a solution or is it revisiting something that maybe there is already a solution to or I’ve already made a decision on. …You said earlier don’t push it down, don’t ignore it, don’t try to suppress it. But we also have been talking about strategies for getting past anxiety. So what is the difference between those two? How can I tell if I’m doing the bad version of getting rid of it versus the good version of getting rid of it? MORRA:  Right. Well the bad version of getting rid of it might be drinking a bottle of vodka. So I think we could all agree that probably drinking a bottle of vodka is not great. Right? Having a martini, love it, having a whole bottle of vodka? Meh. So it’s really about your reactions. Sometimes you might react in a really good way. You might be anxious and you might think I’m going to go for a run, that’s going to really help me. Great. Right? So I think it’s really sometimes flat-out “is this bad for me.” A lot of times we get anxious and we eat, we drink, we take drugs, we spend money, we avoid work, we procrastinate, we overwork, we over-compensate, we try to control our team and drive them crazy. I could go on. I think again it’s about thinking how am I reacting? Is this a reaction that is hurting me? And sometimes you just have to get through the day. So if you’re anxious in the middle of the day but you have to go lead a meeting, go for a walk, breathe, try to do something in the moment and save it for later. But if you’re finding that this is happening over and over again, take a step back and think, “I think I need to think about the root of this, what is causing this and how am I reacting and can I work on trying to react in a different way because this is not serving anybody.” MATT:  How deep do you go on those causes? So earlier you said it’s caused by money, do you need to keep going levels down to find the root of these things? MORRA:  It’s a personal choice. You can learn techniques that will help you manage it more quickly or you can go deep into your parents, like I did, your parents got divorced and your father stopped paying the bills and da da da and on she goes. So that’s a personal choice and that is about where you are in your life. There’s no easy answers. MATT:  What are your favorite in the moments, getting back to that place of positivity or avoiding the anxiety? MORRA:  I talk to myself. [laughs] Like it sounds like you do. And I will say, you know what, anxiety, not now, it’s not a good time. Or, this is a really old trope, the money thing. If there is something that is a recurring anxiety I will just say you know what, this is my anxiety talking, this isn’t the truth. I need to deal with this, I need to be a grown-up here. I will give myself a tough love pep talk. And I actually like to get up and stretch and move a little bit, try to physically shift. Those are some things that work. And sometimes… Sometimes it doesn’t go away and that is really hard, especially right now. And I think many of us just gritting our teeth and getting through some days and that’s okay too right now. MATT:  Thank you for saying that’s okay. That’s a powerful message right there. I’ve really appreciated and enjoyed this conversation. So, thank you. Is there anything we haven’t covered that you think is important for the managers, leaders, CEOs, people listening to this? MORRA:  I think again it’s just… Well, if you are listening to this, I think you want to ask questions. But I do think that checking in with people is really important right now. And I don’t think that that’s necessarily a great thing to do on Slack or via text because it can be read the wrong way. So that is a moment when, even though I hate talking on the phone because I’m an introvert with social anxiety, there is something to be said about just checking in in a more casual way. Even a text, sending them a text on their cell phone versus an email or a Slack, or you could use lots of emojis if you must use text. But the power of one-on-one checking in is really important right now. MATT:  Do you have a pretty strong emoji game? MORRA:  No, I am bad at emojis. [laughs] MATT:  I always admire people who are really good at them because, I don’t know… [inaudible] the emoticons where you just have the colon and the parenthesis, so I feel like I’m not as expressive as I could be on emojis. But I’m working on it because I do think in our text-mediated world it does help. MORRA:  It really does. Just throw a smiley and a heart in there and some flowers and… Maybe not a heart. That’s inappropriate. But just throw a smiley in there and you’re good. MATT:  I hope we can get to a place where the heart isn’t inappropriate. MORRA:  Me too. MATT:  But I could see where it could be misread. I’m sure people are going to want to hear more from you. You have a book, you have a podcast. Tell us all about it. MORRA:  Well, I have a book called “Hiding In the Bathroom” which is literally a manual for getting out there when you’d rather stay home. It’s not about physically getting out there, so it’s still really useful, all kinds of online networking tips and things, ways to think about building your presence when you are an introvert or you have social anxiety. But I really love my podcast. It’s called The Anxious Achiever. And I encourage people to listen to it. MATT:  That is awesome. How about on social or a website? MORRA:  I have a website. It’s womenandwork.org. Or you can go to hidinginthebathroom.com. And you can follow me on Twitter at @morraam. Or on LinkedIn. I really love LinkedIn.  You can look for me on LinkedIn. MATT:   Awesome, I’ve never heard someone say that. [laughs] MORRA:  I do, I love LinkedIn. MATT:  That’s great to hear. Well, Morra, thank you so, so, so, so much. I really appreciate it. MORRA: Oh, thank you, Matt. MATT:  Thank you for joining. I’m looking forward to learning more and checking out your podcast. MORRA:  Thanks. Be well.

Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. Matt Mullenweg speaks with neuroscientist Dr. Adam Gazzaley, co-author of the 2016 book The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, about how our brains work, particularly during times like the current pandemic. How does the brain handle internal and external stimuli, and what do we know about the effect of practices like meditation, exercise, nutrition, and sleep?  Gazzaley obtained an M.D. and Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, completed Neurology residency at the University of Pennsylvania, and postdoctoral training in cognitive neuroscience at University of California, Berkeley. He is currently the David Dolby Distinguished Professor of Neurology, Physiology and Psychiatry at University of California, San Francisco, and the Founder & Executive Director of Neuroscape, a translational neuroscience center at UCSF. Gazzaley co-authored The Distracted Mind with Larry D. Rosen, and he’s a scientist who enjoys seeing his work solve real-world problems. He’s also founded startups, including Akili Interactive and Sensync, to build technology products that enhance learning, mindfulness, and well-being. More can be found at his website, gazzaley.com.  A full transcript of the episode is below. *** (Intro Music) MATT MULLENWEG: Hello everybody and welcome back to the Distributed Podcast. We’ve all had to make so many adjustments in recent weeks and some of them quite radical. I hope that wherever you are and wherever you might be tuning in from this process has been going smoothly for you, or at least as painlessly as one might hope under these circumstances.  In conversations with my colleagues at Automattic and with people at many other companies, both distributed and not, one common thread I keep seeing is how difficult it has been to stay focused in recent weeks. I have been struggling with this as well. We’ve been dealing with non-stop bad news. Many of us have either been directly affected by Covid 19 or know people who have, either health-wise, financially, or socially. Even more of us have had to learn how to work from a new or dramatically changed environment.  So for this episode, I wanted to talk to someone who knows a lot about focus, distraction, and changing our work habits. I couldn’t think of any person more fitting than neuroscientist — and my friend — Adam Gazzaley.  [music] MATT:  Welcome, Adam. ADAM GAZZALEY: Thank you, great to be here, Matt.  MATT: Just to set the stage a little bit for listeners who might not be familiar with your work, you have written.. is it over 130 academic papers? ADAM: Yes, yes. Peer reviewed, more scientific-style papers, correct.  MATT: Even some on the cover of Nature, which is like Sports Illustrated for scientists. ADAM: [laugher] Yes. My musician friends would say it’s my Rolling Stone cover. But yes, that was several years ago, but it was an exciting one. MATT: How would you describe the area of your passion that you’ve devoted your life’s work to? ADAM: It has migrated, maybe evolved, as I like to think of it, over the last 30 years, but yes, it’s been pretty much exactly… I would say 2020 is 30 years since I’ve been in the neuroscience world. I started grad school in 1990 in New York City at Mt. Sinai. I was trained as both a neuroscientist and a neurologist, so both the clinical and the scientific side.  And my research has always had some common elements, a focus on plasticity of the brain, or the ability of our brain to remodel and optimize its function in response to the environment. I focused on neural networks, which is the phenomena that our brain doesn’t work as just these isolated islands but really as an interconnected network of communication that’s constantly and dynamically changing all the time. And aging has been a main aspect of my research.  And I preserved those focus areas through the last 30 years although I’ve moved from animal research, looking under a microscope at the beginning days, all the way to today where I focus on human research using functional brain imaging and tools to understand how the human brain interacts with the environment around us. MATT: Was there any particular personal experience that brought you to attention and focus? ADAM: My research focus when I was a graduate student was more on memory systems and how they change with aging. After I finished my residency in neurology and moved to San Francisco to work at Berkeley and study human neuroscience, I became very interested in what I can do as a scientist that was most relevant to people, not just what was relevant to other neuroscientists or was following an iterative path across the field, but what did people actually care about in their lives.  So this was like mid-2000s, like say 2003-2004, when I was moving my research into cognitive neuroscience, using tools such as functional brain imaging, non-invasive brain stimulation. And I became very fascinated by how people interacted with their environment in ways that were positive for their performance and their mental health and ways that were negative.  And at that time there wasn’t a lot of understanding about the impact of interference in our performance, things like distraction and multitasking weren’t really in the zeitgeist yet of how they may impair our abilities. At that time it was considered a badge of honor if you were a good multitasker, whatever that may mean.  And so I was really fascinated by the idea of doing research on a topic that spoke to people so directly about things that were relevant to their lives. And so around 2005, I really turned my own sites full time into studying attention in the brain, specifically how we manage interference successfully and unsuccessfully.  MATT: At a physical level what happens when we pay attention to something? ADAM: Well attention is such a fascinating concept and one that is worthy of an hour just to unpack it. But just to not go off on an incredibly long tangent as I try to answer that question, I’ll be very specific by what I mean by attention because attention has many, many different aspects to it.  What I assume you meant by that is what we call top-down attention, goal-directed attention. We also have this amazing ability to pay attention to things that are not in our goals. We call that bottom-up attention. It’s how we survived is that you could pick up a very subtle trace, even if you didn’t intend to, of a threat or food or a mate in the environment. This is largely what drives other animals’ attentional processing.  MATT: Do those signals make it all the way to the frontal lobe or are they handled some place lower? ADAM: A lot of those signals are just handled even at the brainstem, some of them even in the spinal cord. You could prick your finger and withdraw without it even going into your brain, a lot of that can happen very local, very reflexive, input-output circuits.  The frontal lobe, which you mentioned, is the most evolved part of the human brain and it is really the seat of the top-down attention. And other animals have it to some degree but most of what we might look at an animal as goal-directed behavior, many of it is not, it’s really this complex but very reflexive response to environmental stimuli. But the top-down attention, that very human-based attention, is the one where we decided based upon our goals and decisions that we make about what we pay attention to and what we ignore. And when we do that, you’re right, it is a process that is driven by neural networks that really involve the prefrontal cortex. And when we look at it inside an MRI scanner with EEG  — and this is what I’ve been doing for almost 15 years now, 15 years actually just this year —  is that we see that there is communication between brain areas that involve the prefrontal cortex and whatever other areas are involved in the operation.  So, for example, if your attentional focus is a visual one, or maybe a visual and auditory one, then we see a network that involves the prefrontal cortex, which allows you to maintain that focus with visual cortical areas and auditory cortical areas. But it may also involve connections with the hippocampus if it involves memory, which it almost certainly does, or the amygdala if it has emotional content.  And so that’s how we pay attention is that we activate these networks that have all the different component systems associated with whatever you’re engaged in. And what we find is that that network is maintained unless you are distracted or you multitask. But that is essentially what happens physically or neurally, which is a chemical and physical and physiological process in your brain. MATT: This is a place where I was saying that you have a whole book on this called The Distracted Mind. And one of the things I found fascinating in the book was not just that your prefrontal lobe can activate different parts of your brain that might be associated with what you’re paying attention to, but it quiets the other parts. Can you talk about that? ADAM: Yeah so we… It is impossible for us to take in all of the elaborate and extensive and diverse inputs that are available around us, even within one sensory modality, even visually you couldn’t, never less the fact that we have olfactory scent information and auditory information. And so we need to selectively process information that’s relevant to us. In this case we’re talking relevant to us based on our goals. And so in order to accomplish that, our brain doesn’t just focus our limited resources on whatever you consider relevant but it actually actively suppresses the information that has been deemed irrelevant. It’s sort of like a filter system.  This was a lot of my early work. A lot of scientists thought that maybe the filter was a passive filter, like the active process was focus and then everything else was passively suppressed just because it wasn’t getting the spotlight. What my research in like 2005 to 2008 and 2009 was showing was that the process of ignoring is as active as the process of attending.  And you could imagine that it creates greater contrast, right? So if you were to be standing on the floor and the floor is your baseline and you jump up, you may add two feet, let’s say, or three feet if you’re really good at jumping. But if the floor also dropped down at the same time you jumped you could imagine that you would be jumping six feet off the floor.  And so that’s how I picture it. It’s not that the baseline stays the same, the irreverent information actually drops down and becomes muffled and that’s what allows us to create even more precise processing of information that’s relevant.  MATT: So when with things that can help you improve your ability to focus or not be distracted, like meditation, which part of that is meditation activating? Is it different for different types of meditation, like a mindfulness [meditation] versus a body scan? ADAM: Yeah, meditation is such a wonderful topic and a complex one. At its core meditation really is attention-training no matter how you slice it, even across all the different types of meditation. I tend to think of meditation in two general categories — open-monitoring meditation and then concentrative, focused meditation. And they are quite different.  Focused meditation has many, many different practices within it. So the most I would say common and traditional in many ways is breath-focused meditation, but focusing on a mantra, so a word or a phrase in your mind, focusing on a mental image or scanning your body would all fall into that category of concentrative meditation. And then open-awareness meditation is where there isn’t a predetermined focal point but rather you keep awareness to whatever arises and then let it move on and move to something else as that arises.  And they are both forms of attention that involve maintenance and switching but the concentrative meditation is I would view as the clearest practice that would allow you to fine-tune your ability to control where your attention is because that’s essentially the nature of that practice.  As a matter of fact, when I talk to meditation thought leaders, like Jack Kornfield, who is a good friend and a collaborator on many of our projects at UCSF, he would say that’s why most meditation, no matter where you wind up, whether it’s meta, like loving kindness and compassion meditation or some type of open-awareness meditation, it often starts with breath-focused meditation because that allows you to have control of where your attention is, and beyond control, it’s awareness of where your attention is. So I’d say that’s a twofold process. MATT: I wonder if there’s a difference between when you’re focusing on something maybe abstract, like a mantra, versus the type of meditation where I’m trying to focus on a bodily sensation like the feeling of breath or a body scan, like how the top of your head feels, how you face feels? Because that seems more like sensations that are coming in that I was ignoring that I’m trying to pay attention to or be aware of. ADAM: Yeah, it’s a great question and I have found very little scientific data on that. It’s something that Jack and I talk about and it’s really a great question because it’s an experiment that we’re planning on running.  We just ran a five-year study and project to build a meditation closed loop experience — and we can break that down a little bit if you’re interested — but essentially a meditation practice that’s very different than people have done previously but one delivered by technology, which makes it more accessible, but also baby-steps you into the focus of breath meditation. And what we found, we actually just had a paper accepted today, I just found out this morning —  MATT:  Awesome. ADAM:  — to a nature journal, yeah, Translational Psychiatry, and we had a paper accepted maybe six months ago to another nature journal, Human Behavior. The previous paper was on healthy 20-year-olds and the paper accepted today was on children, actually adolescents from India with adverse life events, really traumatic events that had attentional problems. And in both populations we showed that six weeks of this breath-focused meditation game improves their ability to focus their attention in a goal-directed way and in the children we showed benefits even a year later. And to bring this around to the question you asked, one of the really interesting future studies that we’re planning now is how would the benefits that we achieved with the breath-focused version compare to a different focal point? And I would go so far as to say how about if that focal point is not even a body sensation but an externally delivered sensory input? For example, our game is played on an iPad or a phone where you close your eyes and you focus internally on your breath, you monitor your awareness of where your breath is, if your focus deviates from your breath, you return it. We can have the same exact type of method but now you’re focused on a flame that you’re looking at on your device — would that improve attention the same way? Might it have the same advantages for your attention but maybe a different advantage or disadvantage in terms of your stress reductions which is another benefit that we have also determined? So it’s a great question. We do not know all the different positive benefits that might come from different focal points during a meditative practice but it’s something we are very interested in. MATT: Awesome. And Neuroscape is the name of your lab at UCSF, correct? ADAM: Correct. So my lab used to, as most professors, used to be named after me, Gazzaley Lab. And I started that 15 years ago at UCSF. And it’s become so big really with our Nature cover that we talked about before, and other activities that now we’re a center at UCSF. So instead of a lab being pretty much defined by having a single PI, principal investigator, now we have multiple faculty members and we’re almost 40 people.  So Neuroscape is a not-for-profit research center at University of California San Francisco. And it did evolve from my lab. And what we do is focus on how we can use technology to improve brain function and also assess brain function but in a more real world way than we have accomplished previously.  MATT: You had four categories of — I don’t want to mess up the terminology — but there was internal, external…? ADAM: Back in 2005, when I started studying interference, I was frustrated when I read the scientific literature because there was no conceptual framework for how to think about interference. Some people call distraction one thing and other people refer to distraction as something else.  And I was like, it’s okay, there’s no right or wrong, but we need to just have a common language, semantics, that we use so that we know that we’re talking about the same thing. So I created this taxonomy of interference that I use and I think others have used it since then and that is thinking about interference in two main categories.  One is what I call distraction and the other is what I call multitasking. And I define them differently based upon your goals. And they both have an internal and an external component. But let’s just start with distraction and multitasking. So distraction is when you have a singular goal. Like your goal as a listener might be right now to listen to what Matt and I are talking about and that’s your primary goal. And that means that everything that falls outside of that is technically a distraction. So since you’re working from home, if your children are running by, that’s a distraction, if your vacuum cleaner is going off in the next room, that’s a distraction. And your goal is to filter all that information and maintain sole focus on what you’re listening to. So anything outside of the goal of focus is a distraction.  Now on the other side of the interference coin is multitasking. Now you have more than one goal. So maybe one of your goals is to listen to this podcast but your other goal, which would be, I think, a foolish goal, is to check your email, right?  So we know very well that you can’t actually accomplish both of those goals at the same time. And the reason people would say multitasking is a myth is because from a behavioral point of view, sure, you’re multitasking, you’re listening to the podcast, you’re going through the email, but if you look at what happens in the brain during this type of dual activity is that you’re not multitasking in the true parallel-processing sense that a computer might be able to run two different processing streams simultaneously without interference.  What’s happening in your brain is that the network involved in listening to this podcast, involving the prefrontal cortex, your auditory cortex, other regions, when you switch over to reading that email, this network is essentially disabled and a new network is activated. And then when you come back to the podcast you have to deactivate that network and come back again.  What we do not see in our studies and other research shows is that those two networks that both demand attention can be maintained with high fidelity simultaneously. And so that’s why I and others will sometimes say multitasking is a myth because when it comes down to what occurs in your brain, we are showing that you’re not capable of maintaining them in parallel.  So what happens is you switch between these networks and with each switch there is what we call a cost. There is a loss of some of the high-resolution information that has to be reactivated. And you can feel that in something obvious like listening to this and doing an email, you know that you can’t do both of them at the same time. You could just empirically assess it in your own behavior. But for other things it’s more subtle. You may not realize that you actually have a performance cost, but you do. We see it all the time.  So those are the two types of interference — distraction and multitasking. And they are different in how they occur in the brain. And we have published multiple papers showing that.  And then for each of them they can occur internally or externally. So just to quickly summarize what that would be… So, a distraction, you’re listening to this podcast, you could have an external distraction, which is what I mentioned, your child running by, a vacuum cleaner going off, if the TV is on something dramatic might happen that pulls you away. That is an external distraction.  But you could have an internal distraction too. Like I said, your stomach may grumble and you’re like, “oh I’m hungry,” and now you’ve been distracted from your task by something that essentially arose internally. Or, you may just have a memory of something, like a bad event that happened yesterday.  For multitasking that could happen externally or internally too. So the example I’ve described about listening to the podcast and multitasking by doing your emails are two external forces. But you could be listening to the podcast and also planning your day. So then you have an external focus but also an internal focus going simultaneously.  And so that just gives you a little flavor of how complex the world of interference is, is that it occurs across these two different domains but has both internal and external variance. MATT: What does it mean or why do some people think that they are able to better focus if they’re in a cafe or have some background noise or something like that? ADAM: Mm, that is a great question that has very little data in the scientific literature. We published one paper on that topic about why do people seek out environments that would almost universally be described as distraction-inducing environments as opposed to low-distraction environments to do something that they need to focus on. I call it the coffee shop effect. I don’t think that’s a name but that’s how we talk about it internally. It just makes sense that if you were doing something that involved focus you should go to a quiet library rather than a busy coffee shop if you’re just thinking about the brain in terms of interference, what I just described. But humans are complicated and there are several [factors] that I hypothesize are involved there.  One is the arousal aspect, that being in an environment that is stimulating can help maintain your focus just by maintaining your arousal. So arousal and attention are not the same thing. One is a wakefulness measure, which is arousal and drowsiness and the other is where your resources are directed, which is attention. But they intersect with each other. So if you’re drowsy, it’s harder to maintain attention. So if you’re in a stimulating environment you can have better attention just because your arousal level is higher and it could also affect your mood. Like, you’re in a better mood and that can also have intersects with attention abilities.  The other thing that’s interesting, and this is what we have started investigating, is that it is possible, and this is still a hypothesis although we’re starting to show evidence, that having external distractions may help you decrease internal distractions. In other words, you’re in a coffee shop and the act of suppressing some of the cacophony that’s around you is also helping you suppress your internal mind wandering, which is the internal distraction.  In other words, you’ve engaged your suppression system and that’s quieting down your own internal mind wandering and allowing you to focus. So if you’re in a library you don’t have that external need to suppress your environment and so now you may find it harder to focus on… let’s say you’re writing an article or reading an article… you have a harder time doing it because your mind keeps wandering. That’s a hypothesis but it’s one that I think is true and we’re trying to maintain, to get some evidence for that now. MATT: And do I remember correctly that most internal distractions or interference tend to be negative? ADAM: Yes. MATT: So would having positive (external) interference, maybe keep those internal negative from bobbing up? ADAM: Yes, that may be. That would be an interesting hypothesis. And that could be done in an experiment by presenting both positive and negative external stimuli and seeing how it regulates your attentional focus, which is something that we’re actually planning on doing. I’ll come back to that in one moment. But that study was not done by us. It was actually published in Science. I’m unfortunately forgetting the last author’s name right now. But what it showed was that if you experience sample, meaning that you have a device — I think it was done by phone — that periodically just pings you and says hey, where is your focus right now, it finds that most people are mind-wandering most of the time and that when they are it’s usually on something negative, which was a really fascinating finding, that that’s where people tend to travel to in their mind-wandering.  And some of that is occurring even while they should be doing something else, or they’re trying to do something else, like have a conversation with a significant other or have sex or other things that you think should be absorbing their attention completely. So yes, most mind-wandering does fall on the negative side, it seems.  MATT: To me that’s the most interesting part of meta, or loving kindness meditations. And as you expand that sort of circle of loving kindness, I guess some people put yourself in the beginning and some people put it at the end as it gets harder. ADAM: Yes. And some people even remove that part of it for beginners because it is in many ways the most complicated. It’s something that I talk about with Jack. We are actually building a meta loving kindness version of Meta Train, which is the app that I described that we just had our second paper published, so moving from beyond breath focus to focusing on words of love and kindness and compassion and empathy. And I think we’re actually not including a self-focus because it is incredibly complicated for all these interesting reasons. It doesn’t mean it should be avoided always but it is really interesting to understand how the act of being kind to yourself is as complicated as it is.  MATT: So much resistance. ADAM: Yes.  MATT: And for listeners who want to learn more, Jack Kornfield, that’s Kornfield with K, right? ADAM: Correct.  MATT: And Sharon Salzberg is another great proponent of loving kindness meditation. ADAM: Yes, she has some great books as well. MATT: One of the things I’ve noticed for myself is that sometimes these bottom-up interference distractions are mixed up. So sometimes I’ll think I’m hungry or I have the feeling of being hungry, but actually I’m anxious or I’m procrastinating or things like that. ADAM: Mhm. MATT: So what’s going on there? ADAM: I think that what you’re describing is just like what I always think of as the tip of the iceberg. We have the 90% bulk of the iceberg, like a whole internal milieu, which is a combination of the sensory inputs, our own memories and reflections that exist below awareness. And then what we experience as our consciousness is really that tip where it bubbles up into our ability to be introspective about it.  And because it’s not singular, it’s not like it’s just 100% anxiety, 100% hunger, 100% joy, it’s complicated, it’s really difficult to understand what is the content of our consciousness at any moment. I think a lot of what comes from a meditation practice is a better ability to be able to make sense of that, that internal space that is now in your conscious awareness.  So the act of being meta, not the same meta that we were just talking about, or loving kindness, but the meta in terms of awareness of your own awareness, right? The understanding of your own world, of your own understanding, is a complicated one. It’s one that I think we take for granted. It’s like, oh, it’s my brain, I know what’s going on. But it’s really not very easy and it takes years of practice to be able to distinguish between things that may have very similar physiological responses, like anxiety and hunger. They are very ancient forces, like fear, that really are trying to capture your bottom-up attention because there is a survival advantage in your attention being drawn to them.  But the way that they do it is not necessarily so sophisticated. So there’s lots of overlap. It’s not like there is a perfectly discrete signal for fear that has no overlap with that signal for hunger or even excitement. So yes, it takes time to be able to distill out all the components of what may be the subject of your awareness at any moment.  MATT: And the more you think of something does it strengthen those neural pathways, make it easier to think of it in the future or more likely to? ADAM: It does so through memory. So there is this really amazing description of memory that you only have one perceptual event, which is when it occurs. And everything after is just a reactivation of the memory, which is why memories change all the time. You’re really not remembering the original perceptual event but every subsequent memory is the memory of the memory. There was only one chance for the perceptual event to be sort of laid into your brain as an event.  So yes, if you keep returning to them… And this happens for good things and it happens for bad things, right? It’s part of what post-traumatic stress disorder is and why it is so debilitating is that very, very salient events that have high emotional content get repeatedly embedded in your networks and then they return both when you want them to and when you don’t want them to. So yes, that is both a positive and negative aspect of how perception and attention and memory intersect. MATT: What do we think is the evolutionary reason for emotions? I think I can guess it for attention and goal-setting and everything but what about emotions? ADAM: Emotions is the tagging of both memories and perceptual events that gives our attentional abilities some sort of rationale for its direction. If you imagine interacting with the world without any emotional content, all of your decisions would be based completely on… I guess I’m going to use a term here that is not devoid of emotion… but based on intellectual decisions — right — based on pure logic, like the Star Trek, Vulcan way. And the emotional elements of it definitely give it a different flavor, they may override some of the more logical decisions in a way that has survival advantages.  So all of these aspects of our internal space and consciousness that we currently experience all had at some point some evolutionarily driven advantage. And you can imagine before we maybe even had sophisticated logic processing, I’m not saying that it’s sufficient right now, but the emotional content is what drove our decision making. Things that led to stronger fear responses led to a more consistent behavioral response of not engaging in whatever caused that fear and things that led to great joy and pleasure and happiness become reinforced and allow you to pursue it again. So it’s a very ancient process that tags different perceptual events as being either positive or negative and allows you to engage in them repetitively or avoid them.  MATT: It would be amazing to understand that better as well, like why meditation can provide that very pleasant feeling or sensation. ADAM: Yeah. I mean, emotion and its intersection with other aspects of cognition, like attention and memory and perception and decision making, is what gets me so excited about modern-day neuroscience.  I think that it’s true for all of science, in my perspective, is that us humans, we really like to put things in categories and study them, in like this chapter and that book. It just doesn’t work like that in the real world and in the brain.  These phenomena are incredibly dynamically interactive. There is no such thing as emotion devoid from attention and perception and memory and decision making and all these other aspects. And I feel like neuroscience is reaching that stage now where we have accepted that the isolated focus approach is not really helping us understand the brain in the real world. And so it’s more complicated and it takes a whole different type of multivariate analytical approaches to understand complex systems in that way but that’s where I think neuroscience is arriving. And I think a lot of good will come from us thinking about the brain and cognition and behavior in that manner.  MATT: Well you are a scientist but you also run an organization. What professionally has changed for you since COVID-19 started? ADAM: Well it’s been quite complicated, as it is for everyone. I mean we all have our own stories and they are all important and fascinating in their own ways. And we have multiple stories. We have our personal story, how are you interacting with your family or your co-shelter-er or by yourself, with yourself, if you are… certainly if you are sheltering alone.  And then there’s the professional story — how are you still engaging in your work if your work even exists during this phase? And these stories obviously intersect more than they ever did now — holding meetings with your baby on your lap would be an example.  In my particular case I am sheltering with one other person, my wife, who I also happen to work with, so that helps. So my story is already interwoven between professional and personal.  I’m in a situation that I find very challenging because we have almost 48 employees at my research center, at Neuroscape, and I feel a personal… I don’t know, burden is not the right word… a personal responsibility, although sometimes it does feel burdensome, to make sure that everyone is okay, that they are safe and that they are happy and of course that they are productive. And that is a weight that I guess was always there but didn’t feel quite so in my face or in my brain as it does right now.  So personally that has been a really challenging journey over the last… now we’re in our sixth week… of really making sure that every one of these human beings and their families are as safe, in all the ways that we think of as safe, as they can be. So that’s a lot of my burden.  From being the director of this center I also have an obligation to make sure that not only are we safe and healthy and happy but that we are productive, that we are meeting the obligations and the mission that we’ve set to understand the brain and help people, that we are meeting the obligations that we have to our funders, whether they are philanthropists or the government, like the NIH, and that we are doing the type of work that gives us satisfaction and feel a sense of personal growth, not just productivity. And so that’s the world that I have been in is trying to both maintain my own personal self-care and make sure that I’m feeling both happy and capable of being a leader and then making sure that my team is and that we are also still doing research in this really challenging time.  MATT: Let’s start with you. So, being one of the world experts, having read probably thousands of papers about the brain and everything, what have you found are the most important things that you do to bring your best to your work? ADAM: I think I keep having this mental image, because I haven’t flown in a long time, but I fly a lot, I know you fly a lot too, Matt, and I wrap around the world pretty continuously largely giving lectures in various countries for the last decade.  And, you know, you go on the plane and you try to ignore that message about how to fly because you’ve heard it thousands of times. But this one part of it that has stuck in my brain now, which is the part where they describe that you put on your mask before you put on the mask for your child, which feels so counterintuitive but obviously they tell it every time because you can’t protect your child if you haven’t made sure that you’re going to survive enough to do so. And I feel that that is sort of the message that I try to embody right now, that if I don’t have my own self-care and make sure that I’m physically, mentally, emotionally healthy I can’t help my team at all. And so I do pay a lot of attention to make sure that I am maintaining the routines, even enhancing the routines that I have taken from my own self-maintenance, through this period. So my diet, my exercise, my sleep, my quality time with my significant other and friends, even if it has to be done virtually, those are super important for me now. They don’t feel superficial or frivolous or that I’m not doing my work or that I’m not taking care of my team. Because if I fall in any of those capacities, I’m not going to be able to function at the level that I think my team needs me to. So I would say that’s the first message, is like self-care has never been more important than it is right now.  MATT: Wow. And do you have anything specific around food, sleep, exercise that you find works really well for you, that you would recommend? ADAM: Oh yeah, I have too much for us to cover in this one podcast. [laughter] It’s like my obsession right now. So okay, I’ll just tell you a couple from my own life. These are not necessarily recommendations for anyone. I haven’t vetted these with careful research.  But I schedule in my calendar my workout times. I have found… and I did this actually beforehand but now I even do it more… I find that these are the things that disappear if they’re not there. My assistant, who does a lot of my scheduling, will just… She will literally fill any unoccupied space. And so I put these in there as important as any podcast that I’m doing or any research or any important meeting. So I think that it is very important to make sure that you treat your exercise as prioritized as anything else. So I put them in there and I never miss them. MATT: What effect does exercise have on the mind?  ADAM: Oh, exercise has more data for preserving the health of our mind, especially with aging, than I would say any other intervention that we have ever studied. And some of that is because it happens to be very well studied, not that nutrition is not important but it’s a lot harder to do the type of randomized control blinded studies on nutritional interventions as it is on physical exercise. But physical exercise, both in terms of resistance training and aerobic training has a plethora of really, really convincing data throughout the lifespan, especially on children and older adults, but it’s there throughout.  And so it has benefits both acutely on your mental functioning and chronically, so long term. So it is incredibly important both in the moment and the sustained benefits in terms of how your brain functions, even in terms of how it intersects with things like the onset of dementia. So it’s incredibly important for older adults that may not have the ability to do heavy weight training or running, even walking in the neighborhood has shown to be beneficial.  I know it’s all complicated now in terms of what’s appropriate to do outside and what isn’t and it depends on where you’re living. But as much as possible using physical exercise to help your mental state and the function of your brain I would give almost the highest checkmarks to.  MATT: You mentioned nutrition. Any strong connections there? ADAM: Yeah, the best data for nutrition and the brain really is around a diet known as the Mediterranean Diet. And many of your listeners may be familiar with it. I would say it’s not because it is the perfect diet necessarily, I think it has a lot of great things, but I think it has been the best studied diet in terms of the brain, especially related to aging. And you’re probably familiar with it, it’s fish and olive oil, nuts and legumes, vegetables, red wine falls in the diet, which makes a lot of people happy. Yeah, so that’s how I try to eat most of the time.  I would say that some of the unique COVID challenges are the fact that you’re now a lot closer to your refrigerator than you ever have been before and using food as a stress reliever or as something to do when you’re bored is not the best idea. I think just like we schedule our workouts, I think food and eating should also be quite diligently scheduled.  MATT: And finally sleep was one you mentioned. ADAM: Yes, sleep is an amazing, amazing field of research. It has become more in the awareness and fortunately the public zeitgeist than ever before. A good friend of mine, Matthew Walker, wrote an amazing book, Why We Sleep. I actually wrote a recommendation for it on the back of that book because I really enjoyed and felt that the message is so critical.  We know that sleep is important for all of our functioning but when it comes to the brain, our memory consolidation and our ability to maintain focus, it’s critical. So finding the right conditions that lead to both time of sleep, being seven hours plus, as well as the quality of sleep, is also critical. And this intersects with technology, like not necessarily engaging in technology late at night. I would add again another COVID-specific piece of advice is that I don’t think it’s healthy to listen to the news all day. I’m not saying that you should be uninformed but just like all other distractions, like in the context of the Distracted Mind, I think that there is a diminishing return in having a cluttered workspace and having a cluttered mind. And that this act of being attached to a news source is likely not going to help any of the things that you need to stay healthy, especially doing it right before you go to sleep. So at least personally I have set, just like I have scheduled times for exercise and eating, I also schedule time for news consumption. It is not something that I do all day long and it is not something that I use as a break. Breaks are really important but breaks are not all created equal. So the break of going on social media or listening to the news I would say is not a great break. It leads to a lot of emotional distress, it could take you through a wormhole where it pulls you away from your goals.  I would say much better breaks are looking at nature, even if you can’t see nature from your window, but looking at even a screensaver of nature. I would say meditation, maybe doing some light physical exercise, some pushups or some squats, these are the type of breaks that are better to take to give you some restoration when you’re working rather than going on to news or social media. MATT: Like I mentioned, there’s a lot of people struggling with this environment right now. Is there any other practical advice you would give for others or that you have given to your teammates for how to operate in this very stressful and anxiety-inducing time? ADAM: Yeah, those are a lot of them. I think that… I mentioned this before but I’ll mention it again… is clutter. In the context of the Distracted Mind and the concepts that we talked about, that our brain has an inability to take in everything at the same time, decisions have to be made on where we direct our limited resources, it helps to have a clean workspace externally.  I have a lot of things around me right now. I use an iPad, a desktop, I have my headset that has its own interface, I have a camera. But I also have flowers and candles around me, things that help maintain a mood that feels very positive to me. And then pretty much everything else I get off the table and outside of my visual space. I think that that’s important for the external environment and definitely a challenge for people at home but it’s important, I think, to try to keep a clean environment when you’re engaged in a focused activity. I would also say it’s important to try to reduce the clutter in your mind. And that’s where the breaks come in. There’s only so long that we can really go before you fatigue mentally. Like, we know a lot about fatigue and there is so much research on fatigue in the physical world, right? Muscle fatigue, even Olympic athletes and professional athletes have embraced the fact that although they are the best in the world they fatigue and they need to restore in order to be able to re-engage at the top of their abilities. It’s the same thing for the brain and the mind. We will fatigue and it’s not a sign of weakness to recognize that. It’s a sign of good-quality introspective abilities to know that you have now reached a point where your productivity has declined and you are more vulnerable for all of these types of interference where you’re just going through the motions of working. So keeping your mind clutter-free involves having the insights to know when you need a break and have an appropriate break, as we talked about, in order to allow for you to re-engage again.  So I would say clutter both internally and externally, being aware of it, is really important. And just like meditation, how you become better at maintaining focus over time, this is also a skill, this idea of introspection, of knowing your emotional and focus-oriented space in your brain, is something that can only come with practice. But I think that it’s always critical and it’s more so now than ever before. MATT: Yeah, the environment makes such a big difference. One thing I have found is that when I get a little stuck, when I’m feeling unproductive, sometimes just moving. I have a laptop, I might go to the couch or against a wall or outside or something. It can help unblock me, get me past whatever the productivity version of writers’ block is. ADAM: I agree. I do that as well. And it can be something really, really easy. Like sometimes I will just do some pushups. It may be more awkward to do it in an office, this might be the ideal time to do those type of things, but yeah, ya know, just ten pushups, ten sit ups, a couple squats, just really reorients your whole brain and that’s a nice simple way of just taking a restorative moment.  I think that it’s really going to be interesting how… I am always fascinated, you know this Matt, by how technology that has entertained us and allowed us to communicate in certain ways may be used to unlock new potential in our brain, to elevate us, not just when we’re impaired and have a clinical diagnosis of depression or anxiety but just everyone that suffers from many types of roadblocks in terms of their thinking. And so I’m always exploring technological tools that allow us to connect more deeply both with ourselves and others and also restore. So I think that’s an area that the COVID crisis right now will help accelerate hopefully is to think about technology in that way.  MATT: We’ve talked a lot about meditation but what are some other trainings that people can do to strengthen their mind muscle? ADAM: Meditation is such a good one because it is just pure attentional focus but it is very hard for people to do at the beginning because the signal that we’re focusing on, like your breath, is very subtle. It’s one of the reasons why we’re working on — especially for children — we’re working on other types of meditation and mindfulness using technologies where you focus on sounds as opposed to your breath. Because we could regulate the sound volume depending on how well you’re maintaining it. So I think there is a real great potential to be able to use technology to unlock new types of meditative processes that are more accessible to some people than traditional meditation has been.  The other big type of attentional training is physical exercise. We did talk about that but I do want to connect those things directly. The data is quite convincing both acutely and in the long term that physical exercise helps attentional abilities.  I would say another one that helps with attention is this aspect of introspection that we’ve been talking about. It’s not enough to be introspective. You actually have to find a way of using the data that you gather about your own internal space and making it actionable, but it starts with some awareness, right? So in other words, knowing that smoking is bad for you is really not enough to quit but it’s a good starting point because if you don’t know it, you’re unlikely to do any of the things that are difficult in order to get there.  It’s the same thing with the distracted mind. Once you realize how susceptible you are to be pulled by these influences, whether it’s just quickly jumping on social media all the time, it gives you then the building blocks to make decisions about how to modify your behavior, not that it’s going to be easy, but at least you now have a little bit of motivation. And then it comes down to routines. We are really great at habit-forming. Not that habit-forming is easy, it takes a certain amount of exposure, but a lot of what we’re doing with our behaviors are really forming new habits. Hopefully those habits that you’re forming are healthy ones and hopefully they are based on your goals and not just based on your environment. Because a lot of the habits we form are not healthy and they’re not based on our goals, right? That is a very common way to form a habit. But I think that if you’re thinking about exercises for attention it’s to start understanding what it takes for you to form a new habit and then try to do those habits and to understand how hard it is to form them. But once you form them it’s really interesting to follow that in an introspective way. Like, for example, I decided that I wanted to use moisturizer,  [laughs] because I don’t. And especially when I go outside in the sun, I’m like, really, should I not put on a moisturizer that has some sunblock? And what I was struck… So I say okay, I’m going to do that in the morning. Like I brush my teeth every morning, I’m just going to add that on. And it was amazing how difficult it was to just add that one practice on to my morning routine, so much so that I literally would have to put the moisturizer right by the toothpaste, which was part of my routine, and risk the  problematic issue of brushing my teeth with moisturizer, which actually happened one unfortunate time. [laughter] Yes.  But it’s really fascinating to follow yourself through a simple aspect of creating a new habit and then realize that it is not trivial but once it happens, it’s in there. And that is a good thing and a bad thing because a bad habit is just as hard to remove as it is to create. So that’s another thing that I would mention.  MATT: For someone listening to this who might be like, “Hey Adam, I’m an old dog, you can’t teach me new tricks,” do we have neuroplasticity even when we’re in our thirties, forties, fifties, sixties? ADAM: Undoubtedly. That was the first research that I did as a graduate student. As a matter of fact, some of my papers in the ‘90s are on that topic, and that topic is aging and plasticity. For a long time, I mean like hundreds of years, neuroscientists really thought that after critical stages of development the brain was basically static and the only changes it made was degradation. [laughs]  Now we do change in a lot of negative ways as we age, and it’s true for every organ system. Our hair changes colors, the calcium in our bones changes, the elasticity in our muscles, but our brain changes in a lot of ways as well. But one thing that it retains throughout our life is plasticity, which is the ability of our brain to remodel itself at every level, the structure, function, chemistry of the brain, all in response to experiences. It is not gone.  And we have many, many papers. If you go on Neuroscape you’ll see our publications. For me they go back 30 years showing that the brain is capable of really amazing plasticity throughout our lives and that is something that we should embrace. And it may decline with aging, I have some data that suggests that, but it is there and finding new ways to unlock and harness plasticity with aging is one of my main research focuses. MATT: Well I’m glad you’re working on that and that is a beautiful and hopeful I think place to end this up. Adam, thank you. Where can people find you? I heard you have an awesome WordPress site. ADAM: So, yes, so Gazzaley.com is the website that acts as a source of all my aspects of my life from my photography to Neuroscape to some companies that I started to bring the tools that we created into the real world. So that’s a really beautiful place for you to visit to see the scope of activities that I’ve been engaged in. MATT: Awesome. And that is Gazzaley. Adam Gazzaley, thank you again for taking the time to speak with us today.  ADAM:  Thanks so much.

Distributed host Matt Mullenweg recently appeared on Sam Harris’s excellent podcast, Making Sense, sharing the “five levels of autonomy” when it comes to distributed work. Listen to their wide-ranging conversation on how companies transition to remote work in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. We love Sam’s podcast, Making Sense, so for more go to samharris.org/podcast/ and you can also subscribe to get his premium content, which is totally worth it. Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen.

Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. The world has dramatically changed in just a few weeks. As companies around the world shift to remote work, how do we navigate this crisis? Distributed host Matt Mullenweg talks to Vanessa Van Edwards, bestselling author, speaker, and founder of Science of People, about how we communicate with our friends, family, and coworkers during a time when Zoom and Slack are our primary tools for understanding each other. To learn more about Vanessa’s work, visit scienceofpeople.com. The full episode transcript is below. *** (Intro Music) MATT MULLENWEG:  Howdy, everyone. Welcome back to the Distributed Podcast. This is our first episode since, well, everything has changed for our lives, for our family and friends and for the way we work. A lot of folks have been using Distributed.blog as a resource for remote work and best practices, so we wanted to do everything we can to help folks out in the weeks and months to come and look for lots of updates to the website that are already happening. Today we are going to speak with Vanessa Van Edwards, an expert on public speaking who had to change the way she thought about her own work. And she also has some great tips for how we present ourselves in remote work as well. So without further ado, here is my chat with Vanessa. Welcome, Vanessa Van Edwards. VANESSA VAN EDWARDS:  Thank you so much for having me. MATT:  I’m very excited. And also, thank you for..  you were one of our featured speakers at the Grand Meetup. VANESSA:  [laughs]  Yes. MATT:  So just to give some background to the listeners, once a year, Automattic would bring everyone together and we invite very few awesome speakers and Vanessa was one of them last year. VANESSA:  It was such a lovely audience, too. I remember they actually gave me a standing ovation, which made me cry on stage. MATT:  Well, thank you very much. And it was I think one of the earlier talks we had in the week so it ended up being fairly influential. Just to give a little bit of background for you though.. Now my understanding is you actually started off doing more online teaching? VANESSA:  Yeah, I did. I actually stumbled into the online course arena before I even realized that was a thing. I was also on  YouTube back in 2007, if you can believe that, when people thought that YouTube was a joke and a fad. And then online courses, I started my first online course in 2011-2012, and thank goodness, because at the time I was teaching a lot of engineers, programmers, accountants people skills. As you know, Matt, I like to joke, I’m a recovering awkward person. And so I was teaching soft skills in a very science-backed way. And so there was a platform called Udemy, where a lot of engineers were taking courses on programming and software, and so I thought well, let me put my “Charisma for Engineers” course on there and see what happens. And little did I know it would totally explode and change my life. MATT:   Wow. So YouTube at the time was I guess pictures of dogs on skateboards. What were you putting on there at the time? VANESSA:  [laughs]  Yes. You know what was really hot when I first got on there? Does anyone remember fingerboarding? Do you remember that craze? MATT:  Ohh, miniature skateboards that you would do with your fingers? VANESSA:  Yes! Yes, so I remember – MATT:  Wow, I haven’t thought about that in a long time. VANESSA: Okay, so I remember I was competing with fingerboarding videos. That was a thing that I was competing against. And in the beginning I was just doing very casual, on-my-phone communication tips, conversation tricks. And the funny part is because it was so casual, YouTube in the beginning was very, very casual, I was doing them from my bedroom and in a weird way that actually endeared me to people and I think got me to really make long-time students. MATT:  It probably felt a lot more authentic, which people now do on purpose. And you, I guess you grew through this and published a book in 2017 called Captivate. Can you just give us a quick rundown so people can check that out? VANESSA:  Yes, for sure. So I always would walk into rooms in college and interviews and I always felt like everyone had this written rulebook of social interaction that I was just missing. And I quickly picked up every book I could find on social skills and relationships and friendships, Dale Carnegie and Cialdini, everything I could find. And one thing I figured out very early was that most social-skills books were written by extroverts. And I am an ambivert, so I am somewhere in between. I lean towards introversion and I also have a lot of social anxiety and awkwardness. And if you are trying to learn people skills from an extrovert who is naturally very good with people, they say very well-meaning things to you, like just be yourself, or be more authentic, or smile more, or be more outgoing. Telling an introvert or an awkward person to be more outgoing is like telling them to not be themselves. So I really wanted to — MATT:  Hmm. It reminds me of that advice where sometimes people are freaking out and you’re like, “just relax,” which is probably the least helpful thing to say to someone. VANESSA:  Amen. I’m also a high neurotic, I mean, I feel bad sharing all my dirty laundry already, it’s only the first five minutes, but never in the history of “calm down” has “calm down” ever calmed anyone down. It’s exactly the same thing with ambiverts and introverts. So I thought what if there was a way for me to study people like you study for chemistry or math with formulas and vocabulary words and maps of networking events and specific tips on what to do with your hands? And that is what Captivate ended up being. But I had no idea that this book would reach as many people as it did. It’s in 16 languages now, which is shocking, and I had no idea there were so many people who were also struggling with awkwardness. MATT:  How did that turn into a speaking career? Did the speaking come first or did the book come first? VANESSA:  The speaking came first actually. Speaking came even before online courses. I started doing group speaking. And in the beginning, because I was, in the beginning I had a niche. In a business they always say niche, niche, niche. And I had taken a weekend passive income course when I was 17 years old — thank you, Mom — my mom is a lawyer and she said, I never want you to be paid for your hours, I want you to create this thing, this  magical thing, called passive income. So she sent me to a seminar in a big ballroom in Los Angeles and I learned about this concept called passive income. And one of the things on there was creating a website or a blog, writing books and then doing speaking. Now speaking is active income, but it, quote/unquote, “can sell books.” So in the beginning I was told to pick a niche and at the time I was 17, so I picked parenting and teens. And so I was speaking to — MATT:  [laughs] VANESSA:  I know, I know. It’s just funny how my business has grown out of that. But I was speaking to PTAs, I was speaking to student groups, I was speaking to some companies, parents, lunch-and-learns. And that is what got my feet wet in the corporate world, realizing “oh, you can reach a lot of people at the same time.” And so slowly I started to grow my corporate speaking and I have been doing that probably since 2008. MATT:  And so just to set the stage a little bit, we’re recording this at the beginning of April, everyone is affected by this COVID-19 pandemic, where in the world are you located? VANESSA:  I’m in Austin, Texas. MATT:  And as a fellow Texan, I’m glad you’re here, but things… We’re probably a little bit behind other places but it will probably get bad here this month. VANESSA: Mhm. MATT:  What have you found so far in your own work as you’ve had to shift in this self-isolation world? VANESSA:  Yes. We saw massive shifts almost from day one. And I think on the personal side, this crisis is having everyone face their personal demons — people’s fear of being alone, people’s fear of being out of control, people’s fear of germs. And one of my fears, definitely, is being out of control. And so in our business we have grown very, very organically specifically on keywords. I bet you didn’t expect me to go to that answer with that question. [laughter] But let me try to explain how this goes. So I didn’t realize this literally until three or four weeks ago — so we have never had to buy traffic or buy ads or pay for traffic. Our first ad campaign was last May, so less than a year ago, everything has grown organically. And I live, our entire business feeds off of keywords. So even down to communication speaker, keynote speaker, conference speaker, Austin, and then all of our blog content. So we track… Every morning I would say I wake up and I look at my keywords, and they are quite predictable. And predictability, I didn’t notice until this pandemic, is incredibly important for my sense of calm, my well-being. And so the first day they announced social distancing in the U.S., I saw all of our keywords, which have been very predictable for the last ten years, immediately decline because our top keywords are things like conferences, networking events, keynote speaker, conversation starters, ice breakers, body language. MATT:  Wow. VANESSA:  It was like my business became immediately irrelevant. My life’s work became immediately irrelevant in a day. And that was — is — terrifying. Now, [laughs] I think it has taken me a couple weeks to realize there’s opportunity there because, while our top 50 keywords dropped to no traffic, very significantly lowered, keywords I didn’t ever pay attention to have started to climb back up. For example, and this warms my heart, the number-one performing post right now, which is by the way paying the bills with ad revenue, is our post on 36 deep questions to ask your partner. MATT:  Wow. VANESSA:  And that makes me so hopeful, because it means that in this crisis people are still connecting, they are still wanting deep conversations, and thank goodness we have some content to be able to help them. And so from that day we pivoted, we started pivoting all of our content. MATT:  Wow. A lot of things you just said really resonated with me. [laughs] Do you feel like some of your background in online teaching is coming back? VANESSA:  Yes and thank goodness. So interestingly I think there are different kinds of online courses — there are online courses, there are online programs. And I had created a lot of them — from 2012 to 2017 was course-creation time. In 2017, Captivate came out, totally changed my business because wow, it was working and it was a book and I had never done that before and it was driving so much corporate speaking and so I stopped making courses. Now we have one big course, it’s our flagship course, it’s called “People School,” and that was selling great. So I took down all of my courses, literally, I took all of my courses off my website. We were also seeing, when we did split testing on the website, that too many choices made no purchases at all. Classic choice paralysis. So I was like okay, we’re going to sell one course, take down all of our other courses, and the book, and I’ll speak. Well, now people want all those old courses again and they want new courses and different courses. And so for the first time I’m thinking you know what, maybe it’s time to dust off the old camera and the old teleprompter and get to it. MATT:  I will say one thing we have observed is that people are looking for online education more than ever. I think people just have a lot more time and so they are very open. And we’re also, all over the country and the world, being thrust into new work situations. So the same way that maybe I was going to a conference and nervous about meeting people before, I might google things that ended up on your website, now I’ve actually been thinking a ton about just how do I show up better for my colleagues that I’m not going to probably see at all this year. Because although Automattic is fully distributed, we were really, a big part of our culture was these meetups. So we would build a lot of the trust and bonding in those in-person times and then kind of draw on it the rest of the year. A question I’m also getting a ton is: how do you build culture when you’re not physically together? So I’m curious. Why don’t you start there — how do you build culture if you’re not physically together? How do you build that trust with each other? VANESSA: Yeah, so one of my favorite things to do is to look at the psychology of change and exactly what we’re talking about here is we already had a lot of companies who were remote, who were virtual, who were working from home, but right now we are looking at people who are being forced into that situation and trying to create culture and connection. And when I think about connection, I go to the chemicals. And I don’t know if this is a weird way to look at it but it helps me break it down into something we can actually produce. So when you’re looking at connection there are — MATT:  And do I remember..? I think I saw one of your videos. Do you actually have some of the chemicals behind you in a video? VANESSA:  [laughs] Yes! Right now I do. I’m gazing lovingly at them. I have literally my three favorite chemicals on my wall, yes. MATT:  Which are? VANESSA: Which are.. okay. So these are the three chemicals that are essential for connection. They are serotonin — and by the way, this is a little bit of a simplified explanation of these chemicals but it gives you a basic idea. Serotonin is the first one. Serotonin is the sense of calm and belonging. It has never been more important than it is right now. It is that feeling that you get when you’re on a video call and everyone laughs together and you go, ah, these are my people. That is serotonin that’s coursing through everyone’s bloodstream at the same time. The next one is oxytocin. Oxytocin, again, a little simplified, is the connection hormone. It’s nicknamed the cuddle hormone because it happens when we touch. Well, what happens when we can’t touch, when we can’t shake hands or high five or fist bump? Well, the good news is they are finding that there are lots of ways we produce oxytocin, because oxytocin is the feeling of the warm and fuzzies. This is when you are on a phone call with someone and they share a vulnerability, like they’re scared or they are not sleeping at night, and you say, [sigh] yeah, me too, and you feel like wow, we are in the same place. That’s oxytocin, that’s the warm and fuzzies. And the last one is really important for how we combat dread. And this is what I’ve been thinking a lot about in the last few weeks is how do we stay productive on these video calls where we are having family members that are sick, where we are worried about making ends meet? And dopamine is actually a critical part of that. Dopamine is the pleasure chemical, it helps us feel excited, it helps us feel motivated, it is an active chemical, it makes us want to take action and it is how we fight dread, malaise, feeling listless. So in a really exciting interaction, you have dopamine. So what I’ve been thinking about, and I’m so excited, I’m going to be doing a webinar for Automattic in the next few weeks, which I’m so excited about, is how do we create those three chemicals in a virtual workplace for our self in self-care and as shared rituals? MATT:  There’s something that we talked about a lot at the GM. You said when hands are visible we’re more trusting and if it’s in pockets, we’re less so. So maybe share that really quickly and then we’ll talk about that. VANESSA: Oh yes, this is one of my favorite pieces of science. The best part about this science is it seems to be very sticky. Whenever I teach it in a webinar or from stage it seems like it infiltrates culture so much so that.. Automattic has been helping with my website, I have my entire company built on WordPress… and on our video calls, they always start with a big wave and they always have their hands visible even months and months later. And the reason for this is because when we first meet someone the very first place we think we look is eyes or face, but actually when you look at eye tracking studies they find that the very, very first place we look is someone’s hands. And they think that this is a leftover survival mechanism that somehow, back in our caveman days, if we were approached by a stranger caveman the very first place we looked was their hands to see if they were carrying a rock or a spear. We also look to hands to see is someone going to touch us, are they going to hand shake with us. And so we are always a little bit aware of the hands. And this is such an easy scientific tip to bring into our real life because it’s basically leading hands-first. The moment your video call turns on, having that waving hello to everyone, can immediately subconsciously take down anxiety when they see it. MATT:  Okay. Now I have been on a lot of video calls in my life and recently. I have started noticing that most webcams are not positioned to have your hands in there. VANESSA:  Yes. So I have two tips for video calls. One is make sure that you scoot the camera or your screen back or get an external camera so that they can see the tops of your hands, basically your upper torso and your head. It does so many things. One, it allows you to see hands easier, two it also allows you to gauge someone’s confidence easier. A really easy confidence cue is the distance between someone’s earlobe and the top of their shoulder. And this makes sense if you think about it logically. If you are tense or anxious, you tense your shoulders up toward  your ears. I’m doing it right now, you might even be able to hear it in my voice. When I tense my shoulders up and then I turtle my mouth down, it really decreases the amount of oxygen I can take in because I am tense. And then the moment I put my shoulders down, it gives me more oxygen, it gives me more space, and I hit my what’s called a maximum resonance point. So to be able to see hands and shoulders, it’s extremely helpful. MATT: Hmm. It’s tough because to me the most important thing on these calls  is the audio quality and sometimes the further people get away from their – if they don’t have some sort of microphone – the further they get away from the computer, which is their camera, the harder it is to hear them or the more background noise that comes in. And I heard you talk a lot about body language, what is the vocal or aural input that influences our trust and acceptance in those three chemicals? VANESSA:  Yes, okay. And by the way, I totally agree with you that the further away your computer is, the worse it is. So you can easily.. if you get earbuds your microphone is as close to your mouth as possible and the camera can be farther away. So that’s a little easy tip, it also helps with background noise and kids playing and all kinds of background things. So that’s my go-to with my teams. Okay vocal power, Matt, this is my favorite topic. We don’t realize that we are constantly making vocal impressions and that a lot of our charisma is being signaled through our vocal power. And this is one of the most interesting studies that I have ever read. It was done with doctors and what they did is they had doctors record ten second voice tone clips. And in these clips they had them say their name, their specialty and where they worked. So it sounded something like this, “Hi, my name is Dr. Edwards, I specialize in oncology and I work at Children’s Presbyterian Hospital.” Something very basic like that. They took these clips and they warbled the words. They made it so you could hear the volume, the pace, the cadence, but not the actual words being said. So it sounded something like this. [warbling, nonsense words] MATT:  Wow, that was a really good warbling impression. VANESSA: Well, thank you, thank you very much. Thank you. And they asked participants to rate these clips on things like competence and warmth. So imagine this for a second, you’re given a clip of gobbledygook and you’re asked how smart is this person, how friendly is this person? And so participants did it and they found that the doctors who had the lowest rating in warmth and competence had the highest rate of malpractice lawsuits. That is an incredible finding because it indicates that we don’t just sue doctors based on their skills, we sue doctors based on our perception of their skills. And so in voice tone, and they looked at patterns, why some doctors across the board rated as highly warm, highly competent, whereas other doctors were seen over and over again as not dependable, not smart. And they found all kinds of patterns. And these are very tied to our body language. Our body affects our voice and our emotion affects our body. So it is this one big circle. And so I’ll give just one easy example here. We know that confidence is contagious. So if someone feels calm and competent and confident in what they are presenting in a meeting, that means they are high in serotonin and that means we feel calmer, confident and more capable in their message, so then we get more serotonin. So the way that we do that is the more space that we have in our body, the better our voice, the closer our voice is to our maximum resonance point. So when you think about voice, we all have a range. Right now I am working very hard to stay in the lowest end of my natural range. When I get excited or I’m talking to my daughter, I talk a little bit higher, like this, [demonstrating] and when I’m like oh hey baby, how are you, it’s so good to see you, I miss you, I love you. Now if I did the entire podcast like that, it would drive you crazy. You couldn’t listen to it. [laughs] And that is because those are both natural to me but one of them shows less space, it’s higher up, versus now, I’m hitting the lower end of my range. Now we know that people who are relaxed, they have low shoulders, high head, space between their torso and their arms, in other words they are using hand gestures, that actually translates into lower, more resonant voices. MATT:  If I were going to put up a post-it note by my webcam of some things to think of and do before I go on a meeting with colleagues, what would you put on that post-it note? VANESSA:  Lower your shoulders. [laughs] And that’s, I know that sounds really weird. My second choice would maybe be “breathe,” but that’s… We always breathe so that one is not as good. But I’ll give you an example. So a lot of the times people answer the phone or get on a video call or start their speech or their presentation on the highest end of their breath. So they take in a deep breath and they go [inhale, in a high-pitched voice] hello? And they are at the very highest end of their breath. That sounds tense. Your shoulders also go up when you do that. When you speak on the out breath.. So that sounds like [demonstrating] hello, your voice immediately goes down, your shoulders immediately go down and then it’s a much lower resonance point. So if your shoulders are down it’s not only that you are probably breathing, but it’s probably that you are [out breath] speaking on the out breath. MATT:  Anything else on the post-it, number three? So we’ve got lower your shoulders, breathe, and maybe room for one or two more. VANESSA:  Hand gestures. So there’s two aspects of hand gestures here. First, visible hands, yay, bonus points, love when your hands are visible, wave hello, keep them visible when you’re talking. The second aspect is competence. And that is that we tend to look for hands for further or deeper comprehension. And this also touches very closely to honesty. And the reason for that is because it’s very easy for a liar to lie with their words, it’s very hard for them to lie with their hands. And so we look to gestures to look for congruence. We are looking to see if someone’s hands match their words. And we did a huge TED Talk experiment in our lab where we looked at the most popular TED speakers based on view count and we saw there was a clear, clear difference between the most viewed TED Talks and the least viewed TED Talks. The most viewed TED talkers use very explanatory gestures. When they are talking about three things, they hold up tree fingers. When they are talking about a small idea, they hold it small, like a little tiny jewelry box. When they’re talking about a big idea, they literally act like they are holding a beach ball. This is incredibly important even if you’re on the phone, even if you’re not on video. Researcher Susan Goldwin Meadow found that our hand gestures contribute to our vocal charisma. So right now I’m using tons of hand gestures. You can’t see but they are just moving and moving and moving. If I were to sit on my hands that would actually translate into two things. One, we recall less and are less vocally fluent without hand gestures. So hand gestures actually help you be more interesting. By the way, I’m sitting on my hands and I couldn’t even think of the word. Your hand gestures help you be more charismatic. I’m bringing them back out. And they help add depth, personality to your voice, even if you’re just on the phone. MATT:  I have heard that when you’re virtual versus when you’re in person, you should try to amp up your energy a bit more. Do you find yourself doing that when you’re doing online courses versus in person? VANESSA:  Ooh. Okay. So I do not believe in fake it till you make it. I do not believe in faking energy if you don’t have it. I also think that there is something naturally human and beautiful that happens when you  match the energy of the person you’re with as much as that feels good to you. So if you have a lot of energy because you’re passionate about your topic, yes, keep it as high as it feels good for you. If you don’t feel energetic — you’ve gotten bad news, you’ve had a long day — the worst thing you can do is be forced happy. And we all know what this sounds like, right? It sounds like this. [demonstrates] Hi everyone, it’s soooo good to see you, so today..  Ugh. Like, ugh. I just.. We just can’t do it. So what I would say is first, try to honor where you naturally are. The other thing I would say is, Matt, you have a very calm, peaceful way of speaking. When I met you in person, you have a very calm, peaceful presence as well. What I like to do is actually try to match and mirror your energy as much as possible. So I’m actually speaking at a lower volume, at a lower energy than maybe I would with someone who is a fast talker and super high energy and pelting me with questions, because I actually want to be on the same energetic page as you. MATT:  Interesting. I always think about trying to get folks who are a little more amped up to compensate for my more normally dulcet tones. [laughter] One thing I’ve noticed as well is group dynamics. I recently blogged about this, that I don’t love Zoom calls where everyone is muted. Have you ever run into that where it’s like you’re not getting any auditory feedback on things you say? VANESSA: Oh, yes. Actually it’s really a subtle thing that you picked up on that’s really important. So, oh my goodness, if I could remember this research… I’m going to paraphrase this research because I haven’t read it recently but I believe it was by a researcher, Monica Moore. And she found that in a conversation when a man says more mmm, ahh, ohh, in a conversation, when they’re listening, just when they’re listening, the woman finds them more attractive. MATT:  Hmm. VANESSA:  And that when women say mmm, ahh, ohh, the woman also likes the conversation more and the man feels like he’s being better listened to. So there is something very important about that feedback loop. So a couple of things here — one, if you have a small enough group I do highly recommend keeping people off of mute unless they have a cat sitting next to them and they’re typing on the keyboard or kids in the background. But two, if it’s too big of a group, give time where you want people to come off of mute. So, for example, if someone is presenting and you want to say, “oh let’s give them some feedback, everyone unmute themselves, give them a round of applause” — MATT:  Ahh. VANESSA:  — Or, okay everyone, we’re going to do a little intro here, everyone unmute themselves, say  hi. Unmute. Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi. Thank you. You can actually have group, even with Zoom calls of 50+ people, his, applause, byes, thank yous, it’s really the next best thing. MATT:  That is a really interesting tip. We have started to do more jazz hands instead of applause as a visual way to applaud and I guess I actually learned it’s the American Sign Language for clapping. VANESSA:  Yes. MATT:  But I’ll try the unmute thing. We do a monthly town hall, which is where generally anyone can ask anyone any questions and I try to answer them or other people jump in to answer them. But it is typically only one or two people unmuted and then many, many hundreds watching. Have you picked up anything else on Zoom that we should be leveraging that the software might help make things a little friendlier or a little better? VANESSA:  Well, you know I love a good filter. So if you have not discovered the filter yet on Zoom it really  lightens you up, makes you look like you’re sleeping really great. Do you use the filter, Matt? MATT:  Oh this is the one that smooths you out, right? VANESSA:  Yes. MATT:  Yes, let me see exactly what it’s called. That one is kind of neat. It’s under Video and it says “Touch up my appearance.” And I do not have it on right now but maybe I should turn it on. VANESSA: I’m going to change your life, Matt. You’re going to look so young and so well-rested, it’s going to be amazing. MATT:  Have you tried the Snap camera yet? VANESSA:  I have not tried it yet, what is it? MATT:  So Snap, as in Snapchat, released a computer utility that lets you do Snapchat-like filters, so more fun ones or irreverent ones, in real time through your web cam. VANESSA:  What..? MATT:   I know. VANESSA:  Oh that’s real cool. Okay so that’s really cool. So filters, Snaps. I was just talking to your team about this, most people also don’t realize that you can have multiple co-hosts. So if you’re running a meeting, like a smaller meeting, and you need help with muting people or posting things in chat or recording, I always recommend double- or if not triple-recording. You can make as many people as you want co-host and they have controls to help you. Because as a meeting manager it can be a lot to do it all yourself. MATT: I’m also going to throw in one of my favorites and cheapest improvements is just a lamp or positioning yourself where you’re facing a window rather than being backlit. The lighting can make such a huge difference, especially as the days start to get shorter or you’re on meetings at odd hours. You don’t want to look like you’re in a horror movie or badly lit otherwise. VANESSA: Oh my goodness, lighting from the front, game changer, probably even better than that filter I just told you about. I’ll also give you one more. So it’s really helpful if you look… The tendency for the eye is to look at the person speaking, which is actually underneath the camera, or to the side of the camera, depending on where your camera is. What I do is I actually shrink my Zoom screen down into a very small video and put it right below where my camera is so that when I’m looking at the camera, I am also looking at people’s faces and it doesn’t feel like it’s that different. MATT:  That is so cool, I do the exact same thing. [laughs] It’s neat that we both independently arrived at that. And my dream is for the camera to be able to be on this screen a little better. VANESSA: Oh  yes. Yes, exactly. I do try when I’m speaking to speak directly to the dot. MATT:  Yeah, that is really hard. I also sometimes make the Zoom full screen so I don’t have any distractions but then I end up turning my head, because I have a really wide monitor, when different people are speaking. I don’t know if that looks like I’m looking at something else or whether they have some sense that maybe I’m turning to look at their face. VANESSA:  I say that to people. Like if I know that I have… I have a couple of external screens, I will literally say hey, I’m actually looking at you on the other screen even though you don’t realize it, just because you don’t want people to assume that you’re checking email or something. I also have a master-level tip. If you really want to get good at video call, if you really want to get good at video call, I would highly recommend learning the seven universal facial expressions. Dr. Paul Ekman is an amazing researcher, he’s where I got my training, and he discovered something called the micro expression, which is a universal facial expression. It’s a very quick one, it’s less than a second, and it’s our natural reaction to emotions. And he has discovered across cultures and genders and races there are seven universal facial expressions. I will tell you, learning those facial expressions was like suddenly seeing the world in HD. I was seeing emotions behind words, I was seeing how my words were being heard. And so I would highly recommend, and I have these all for free on my website, I think this is a universal skill, I think everyone should have it, so just go ahead, you can look at it all for free. We have video demos and photos on there. Once you learn how to spot the universal expressions you no longer have miscommunications about emotion. You are able to skip a lot of the “what is she feeling, what is she thinking,” with knowing wow, that was sadness or hmm, that made her nervous, that was fear, or whoops, just saw some contempt, I better back up and explain again. If you really want to be a dynamic presenter or meeting coordinator, I highly recommend learning those seven. MATT:  What should we google to find that on your site? VANESSA:  Its scienceofpeople.com/face and you’ll see lots of me making funny faces for your benefit. MATT:  That is awesome. Did you have any acting in your background? VANESSA: [laughs] No, no, not at all. I’m actually honored that you asked because it means I’m doing a decent job. Although I will say I have always wanted to be funny and I used to think of myself as funny, now it’s just an accident when I’m funny and people are laughing. So I have tried to take improv. And when I was seven years old, I carried around a bunch of jokes in my pocket because I had no friends and so what I would do on the playground is when anyone sat next to me I would pull out my book and I would tell a joke. So I have tried it a little bit in comedy. MATT:  I kind of love that. On these facial expressions, do they ever steer you wrong? Because sometimes I can see myself on the webcam and maybe the lunch I ate wasn’t sitting with me well and I feel like my face is not expressing my inner emotional state, or it’s expressing something that has nothing to do with what the person is saying. VANESSA:  Yes. Yes, absolutely. I’ll give you a really real example. I was hiring a new person on the team and loved her resume, we had a great phone interview, brought her in to do an in-person interview and she kept making these really negative facial expressions, specifically she kept making contempt. And I thought my gosh, this is not what I expected. And it kept throwing me off. And I was like god, that interview did not go well. And so I kept looking for more candidates, I didn’t find anyone as good as her, and I called her and I was really honest, I said, Listen, you were my first choice but when we met in person, I had the feeling that you were worried about something or something was wrong. And she said, You know, I wanted to wear a pair of heels to the interview and I borrowed my roommate’s pair of heels and they were too small. And I didn’t expect us to walk to coffee and as we were walking around and standing at the coffee bar, I was in a lot of pain. MATT:  Ohh… VANESSA:  And so it had absolutely nothing to do with me or the interview but it did steer me wrong. So since that experience, that was about four years ago, since that experience I have developed just a rule of thumb, which is the rule of three. If you see a negative or positive facial expression, before you do anything about it, before you take it seriously, you want to look for three other pieces of evidence. And this could be non-verbal or verbal. So let’s say that you see contempt. Contempt I’ll teach you even though we’re audio, it’s the simplest of the micro expressions. It’s a one-sided mouth raise, so like a smirk. So if you try it with me, if you just smirk one side, you’ll kind of feel better than, like a little bit scornful. It’s like a hm, hm. Don’t do it for too long. So contempt is a very powerful expression because it is very simple and people often mistake it for apathy or even half-happiness, like a smirk. So if I see contempt on someone’s face, like I did on her face that day, I should have been looking for two other cues that she actually felt contemptuous. That could have been verbal, like a disparaging comment or a difficult question or a non-verbal cue like pulling away, distancing behavior, blocking behavior, a shame gesture. The universal shame gesture is when someone touches the side of their forehead with their hand. So I would be looking for two other cues to say okay, there really is something negative happening here. MATT:  Huh. In trying to get my hands visible, even though my camera isn’t well positioned for it, I found myself trying to cross my hands a little bit. I’m trying to describe it, like if you crossed your fingers and then rested your elbows on the table, maybe you can imagine that. VANESSA:  Yes, yes. MATT:  So that my hands were visible. And I also find myself leaning, having one hand that my head leans on a little bit, which I also feel a little bad about because we’re not supposed to touch our faces, but I’m home so I do. Is there anything there that we should keep in mind, anything with those particular gestures which is good or bad? VANESSA:  Yes, great, great point. Remember that there is kind of a hierarchy when it comes to non-verbal. So I would rather see your hands even if they’re touching your face. I would rather see your hands even if they’re in a blocking gesture, like in front of your body, because on video camera that’s pretty much the only place they can be. They can either be typing, they can be resting lightly in front of you or you can be holding your head. You’re not just going to hold your  hands up in the you’re arrested position, right? So yes, I would say resting them lightly in front of you, as long as they’re not tightly gripped. Any kind of fist or tension in our hands typically signals tension in the body. So nice and loosely at rest, I love it. Lightly touching your face or keeping your hand on your face is better than picking at your face or playing with jewelry or playing with hair. My personal favorite actually is I almost always have a pen in my hand and my Moleskin notebook next to my computer and so almost always I’ll be holding my pen, which keeps it visible and kind of poised. It’s more of an active response, and it’s also very authentic because I’m usually taking notes. MATT:  There is one other thing which I wanted to bring up, which I think I got from some of my HR colleagues here at Automattic, is that there are so many ways to misinterpret things when you’re in lower-bandwidth communication, so when you’re not in person. We talk about API, or assuming positive intent. Is there anything in your teachings that goes around that? VANESSA: I love that. I love that different definition of API. I think that there is something really interesting that directly ties into this and it’s the idea that we tend to think that our positive cues are overly obvious and our negative cues are not as obvious. And this is a really big aspect of likability. We typically think that people know that we like them, but actually it takes far more for someone to be sure that we like them than we realize. And so not only do you have to assume positive intent, I think we also have to be incredibly clear with who we like and what we like. You might assume that you have told a colleague or a teammate that they have done great work, but it takes three to four times — and I am making up that number because it very much varies based on romantic settings, professional settings, and friendship settings. But I think in a professional setting you can tell yourself that it takes three to four times of telling someone that you appreciate them, that you like their work, that they did great work, that you enjoy working with them on a team for them to actually believe that’s true. Whereas one small what’s called a micro negative, one small negative gesture, like an eye roll or a [loud sigh] that they hear at the beginning of a video call, or one short, terse email that you sent because your kid was yelling and you had to get the email out as quickly as possible, that one email can negate three to four positive sentiments. So what I would say here is be absolutely sure the people on your team know what you enjoy about them — that you enjoy working with them, talking about them, talking to them, that they are productive, that you appreciate their skills, that they have helped you in some way. There is something called the positive impact test and recently I have been doing this every night. So at the beginning of this crisis, I was having a really hard time sleeping. I was worried about business, worried about traffic, worried about family, and I just couldn’t fall asleep at night. And I realized it was because I was in these worry cycles where I was just worrying about the same things over and over again. And so I decided that every night I wanted to do the positive impact test. This was a test that was developed by Tom Rath and I just shortened it into three questions. And this is what I ask myself every night at 9:00. And if the answers are not yes, I try to fix it. So they are, in the last 24 hours, have I helped someone? In the last 24 hours, have I praised someone? In the last 24 hours have I told someone that I cared about them or appreciated them? They are three questions that ground me on what matters. Revenue doesn’t matter, traffic doesn’t matter, but me feeling like I’m doing my very best in this crisis does matter. And so what I would say is maybe you could invite yourself to ask yourself at the end of a workday or the end of a night that you should be able to very clearly answer those at least at the end of a week. MATT:  I love that. So thank you for sharing.  We mentioned a few times that you’re going to be giving a talk at Automattic soon. I would highly encourage every person and every company listening to this. Do not stop your internal education and helping people get better just because everyone is working from home. If anything, it’s even more important now because people… I think it helps them feel agency if they are able to learn new skills or get better at what they’re doing, which is a very unusual and challenging work environment for all of us. So Vanessa, where can people find out more about  you? Where can they reach you, where can they see you on YouTube, Twitter, etcetera? VANESSA:  Yes, you’re so kind. So everything is at scienceofpeople.com. You’ll see all my resources. I am also on YouTube, Vanessa Van Edwards, and I would love to help in any way that I can. MATT:  Vanessa, thank you again, you bring together so much great information, you synthesize so much, saving people a ton of time. They can listen to you for an hour instead of reading 20 different books. And I do really appreciate your wisdom and thought that you bring to this. So thanks for coming on and hopefully we can get you on again sometime in the future. VANESSA:  Yes, I would love it. Thank you so much for having me. I hope everyone stays well.

Read more about Jason Fried in “Working Smaller, Slower, and Smarter.” Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. For our first episode of the year, host Matt Mullenweg talks to Jason Fried, the CEO of Basecamp. Jason runs a semi-distributed company that’s been making project management software for 20 years. He’s accumulated a wealth of wisdom about how trusting employees and treating them with respect can yield long-term success.  The full episode transcript is below. *** MATT MULLENWEG: Howdy, howdy, and welcome to the Distributed podcast. I am your host, Matt Mullenweg, and I’m here with our first episode of 2020. Today’s guest is Jason Fried, the CEO of Basecamp, a semi-distributed company that’s been making project management tools for about 20 years now. Back in 2013, Jason wrote a book called Remote, which was an early manifesto for remote and distributed work models. I’m excited to catch up with him to hear about what he’s learned in the six years since that book came out and how Basecamp operates today.  All righty. Let’s get started.  MATT: Jason, I am so glad to connect today. JASON FRIED: Likewise. MATT: Basecamp, formerly known as 37signals, has been in so many ways an inspiration for Automattic over the years, and I’m sure countless other distributed companies, so thank you for that, first and foremost. JASON: Of course. And I would say likewise. I mean, you guys are even more distributed than us, so I feel like you’re the ideal situation where we’re getting there because we still have about 15 people in Chicago and we have an office that we’re maybe getting rid of, so we’re going to be following in your footsteps.  MATT: Ah. So we had zero offices but then with the acquisition of Tumblr we’ve now got a space in New York again, so we’ve gone in the opposite direction. JASON: Ahh, right. That’s funny how we keep trading. Yeah. We’re not sure what we’re going to do but our lease ends in August so we’re thinking about moving on, as in moving on to nothing and then trying to do that for a while and see what happens. And if that works out, we’ll do that. If not, we can always go back to getting an office again. But we’ll see. MATT: Just for our listeners who might not be familiar with Basecamp, what do you publicly share about the scale of the company, customers, number of employees, that sort of thing? JASON: Well we have about 56 people who work at Basecamp and we have close to 100,000 paying customers all-in across all of our different products. Although, Basecamp is the primary product, but we have Basecamp, we have Highrise, we have a few others, but basically it’s Basecamp in all three generations. Some have Classic, Basecamp 2, and Basecamp 3.  This is as specific as we’ll be, but we generate tens of millions in annual revenues and annual profits. And we’ve been around for 20 years. This is our 20th year in business, and we have been profitable since the start. That’s a big thing for us, is to always be profitable. So that’s the only KPI, we don’t really use those terms, but that’s the only one we have, which is, let’s make sure we make more money than we spend every year, and other than that, whatever happens, happens. MATT: How do you think about investing more or not? JASON: We don’t have an investment shortfall kind of thing. It’s not like if we only had an extra — I’m just making up rough numbers here — an extra million bucks, we would do X or Y. We have everything that we need to do and we don’t want more people because we want to keep the company as small as we possibly can. So we have, not a dilemma really but it kind of is, in a sense, because I feel like we’re doing everything we could do and having more wouldn’t help us.  In fact, I think in some ways it would probably hurt us. We’d be a little bit slower, we’d be probably doing too much work at the same time, which I think can often dilute what you’re really trying to do. We might take on more stuff than we really want to. We might just find work, invent work, to keep people busy. There’s always of course more work to do, but we believe in doing it at a certain pace, and I think having more people, or fewer people, at this point would kind of mess up that pace. MATT: When you say as small as possible do you mean by customers or by colleagues and employees? JASON: I mean employees. I mean the number of people who work here. We have always wanted to stay at 50 or less but we’re about 56 right now and that feels like a really good place to be, so we’re very comfortable with that. The thing is that we could have considerably more people, but again, we’re just not really — maybe we’re just not good at it. I’ll just take the blame for that. I’m probably not good at running a much larger company than this and I don’t think David is either. I don’t think we want to.  I think it also keeps you a bit more honest in terms of the experiments you’re willing to do, which — and in some places more and more and more experiments is a good thing. I think a few are a good thing but I think too many — people can get stuck doing things that never ship over and over and I think that can be a bit demoralizing.  So we think we’ve got a good enough feeling here right now at least. But then again, we’re the largest we’ve ever been, and I’m sure when we were 30 people we said 30 is enough. So we’re here at 56, that feels like enough right now. A lot of it probably has to do with the success of this other product we’re going to launch next year. Because the one part of our company that does have to continue to grow is customer service. Product development doesn’t have to grow, we have enough people there, but as we have more and more customers, of course, we have to make sure we support them at the highest level. So that is one place where growth does continue to happen even if we don’t want it to. MATT: Yeah, for Automattic that’s been pretty large. It’s been at points that half of our company was customer service just because we wanted to maintain a certain level there. And as the customers went up, it just got — it goes linearly.  JASON: Yeah. MATT: It’s one of those things that — of course you want to invest in making the product easier and documentation and self-help and everything like that, but at some level if you want a person talking to a person you need some more of them. JASON: Yeah. You know, you want to do documentation and make things easier and everything, but I’ve also come to change my mind a little bit on it. Earlier on, when we had fewer people, we were focused on the self-help side of things and making sure our documentation was really good and our answers were great online and people could find their own answers.  And we want to make sure that that’s true too, but I also see customer service interactions as a competitive advantage. Most companies are pretty terrible at it and the larger the company is, it seems like the worse they get. Try to email Google and get help. It’s like — forget it. Or Amazon, sometimes, but not always that great, although quite good sometimes also. It’s one of these things where the larger you get, the more customers you have, the harder it is to maintain that level of standard.  MATT: Have you tried out a live chat for customer support yet? JASON: Yeah we do that sometimes. And it depends on availability. And then we also use Twitter as well for that. Those things all work out really well. It just depends. We want to meet people essentially where they are, with the exception of we don’t have a published phone number, but if you want us to call you, we will. MATT: Yeah. Live chat was a big step function for us. Both in terms of agent and customer happiness, because you can resolve things on the spot.  JASON: Yes. MATT: We do a support rotation where everyone at the company does customer service for at least one week a year. Mine is actually coming up in a couple of weeks. JASON: Your turn, you mean? MATT: Yes. So if you contact us in the third week of December, you might get me. JASON: Ha! We do the same thing, we call everyone on support one day every roughly six weeks or eight weeks… So we’ll each do support for a few days a year throughout the year. It’s great and I’m glad you guys do that too.  I think it’s one of the most valuable things you can do for a variety of reasons — camaraderie, hearing from customers and understanding the language they’re using, sensing their frustrations or their happiness or whatever it might be. And then also just having a lot of respect for customer service as a job and as a career.  In a lot of places, customer service is treated as almost a part-time job, a stepping stone to somewhere else. But I think it can be a wonderful career and it’s just really nice to see the people who’ve dedicated their time here — and this is my only experience of course — to working in customer service for five, six, seven, eight-plus years and really see the work that they do and see how important it is. It’s our front door, it’s our front line, it’s really important to experience that. MATT: What is your company breakdown now in terms of roles in the 50-ish? JASON: I’ll give you some rough numbers because some people are multiple things, so you can’t really… MATT: Sure. JASON: I’ll give you the counts, it just might not add up to 56. But so we have currently, I believe 16 people in customer support, and that also includes, I believe — this might make it 17 or still 16 — the team lead. So all of our managers or team leads are working managers in that they do the work too. So 16-ish on customer service.  We have seven-ish on technical operations, all the server work and that kind of stuff, all the low-level infrastructure work. And then we have four people on what we call the SIP team, which is Security, Infrastructure, and Performance. We have about seven full-time designers, we have around 15 developers. Actually a few fewer than that because some of them are now on SIP, but around that number.  We have two people who do our podcast work, we have one data analyst, we have an office manager/bookkeeper. We have a Head of People Ops. And then we have David, who is CTO, and me, I’m CEO. We have a Head of Strategy and a Head of Marketing. MATT: And did I hear it right that you seem to have a two-to-one or a three-to-one developer to designer ratio? JASON: Yes. Close. Depending on — in some companies you’d consider ops programmers. It just depends on how you all add it up. But yeah, we have probably a two-to-one programmer to designer ratio. Or I should say product development programmers, because we have programmers who do other things. But on the product side of things, basically two-to-one. The way a typical team is structured here at Basecamp is there’s three people working on something — three or two — never more than three at a time and when there’s three it’s usually two programmers and one designer and when it’s two, it’s one programmer, one designer. And then of course sometimes there’s some things that a designer can do on their own and sometimes there’s some stuff that a programmer is going to do on their own. MATT: I’m going to toot your horn a little bit in that in your latest book, It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work, there is an excellent chapter on the three-person teams. JASON: Oh yeah. MATT: I do think something that’s interesting. A lot of the listeners here get obsessed about the 1,000+ person distributed companies, and people sleep on Basecamp a little bit. But I think that would be incorrect, because you all are an amazing example because of your culture, your retention, everything, where you move really fast and do quite a bit for your size. And that’s where I think there’s a lot of learnings for companies of all sizes. JASON: Thanks, we try. I think one of the reasons we’re maybe able to do that is because we don’t do a lot of other things that most companies do. We don’t have a lot of meetings, we don’t share calendars. It seems like a simple thing but it has such a huge influence.  When nobody can take anyone else’s time through a system, people end up with more time to themselves. When you have more time to yourself, you end up doing better work and more work. You can get a lot more stuff done in a given day than maybe you could in another organization that has six times as many people but 20 times as many meetings, 30 times less time during the day to yourself. So we try to avoid anything that breaks days into smaller and smaller chunks. So we are pretty anti-chat for work. We use chat internally in Basecamp for mostly social stuff. But any time there’s anything going on at work we write it up in longform and we post comments and we let people discuss it over a matter of days on dedicated pages inside Basecamp. So that’s the kind of stuff that we’re able to do, and it gives people a lot of their time back. MATT: What are your favorite meetings? What do you look forward to? What’s a meeting you love? JASON: Two or three people might get together in a room — typically it’s two — or on a Zoom call or something like that, to work something out, hash something out. That, I enjoy.  I enjoy really working on a problem, like a design challenge or “God, how are we going to figure this out?” or “This seems complicated, how could we simplify this?” Or “What’s the best way to write this sentence? This headline just isn’t quite there.” That, those productive moments when we are actually making something versus talking about making something.  I don’t like talking about making things, I like the making of things. So whenever I’m together with somebody and we’re working on something real, [I] love those all the time. And I’ll do that many times a week. But just to sit around a table and have people go around a table and talk about stuff that isn’t actually the work — I think it’s important to have those discussions, but I don’t think they need to be happening in person or via video.  I think most of that stuff is better off written down. It allows people to really present themselves, a full idea. We call it “forcing the floor.” The idea being that if you’re standing up or sitting down, or whatever, in front of a bunch of people, and you’re talking for a while, there is a good chance someone is going to interrupt you and ask you a question or whatever. And there is nothing wrong with questions.  And this is especially bad in chat rooms. You can’t possibly own a chat room for a while while you make a case. You just simply can’t. People will chime in and that’s a problem. Now, I’m not a big fan of chat, but there should be a pause button when you chat. You should be able to hit pause, which would prevent anyone else from saying anything while you’re talking.  The reason that should exist is because you need to have the floor. You need to make your point. That allows you to work your thoughts out yourself, get your thoughts together and put them out there in the world as a single unit. And that allows other people to read that single unit uninterrupted and take their time to respond back to you.  If you’ve taken three days to think about something and you say it in a meeting and people start just throwing stuff right back at you — in some ways you’re asking them to because you’re sitting at a table, what else are they going to do? But it seems unfair to them, in fact, for them to have to react to this thing that you have thought about for three days or three weeks or three months, for them to have 30 seconds to say something back seems unfair.  By writing things down in longform and publishing them and giving people a chance to get back to you on their own schedule, I think you end up with much deeper and fairer discussions and better discussions. So that’s why we do have, quote, “meetings,” in a sense, but they’re not meetings in time, like around a room physically or even on video, they are written down and people respond over a number of days, on their own schedule, and those conversations are much richer. MATT: Well that emphasis on writing and the well-written word, how does that influence your hiring process? JASON: It plays a big role. Aside from somebody being able to do the job — obviously, the fundamental job — beyond that you’ve got to be a great writer. If you’re not a great writer, you will not get the job.  The first thing we look at whenever someone applies for a job is the cover letter. We don’t look at the resume first, we look at the cover letter first. And the cover letter is the first filter. Can this person explain themselves well? Are they clear-minded? Are they clear writers? Are they clear thinkers? Do they want this job, or are they just applying for any job? Typically a resume is going to be sent to every job the same way, for the most part. You’d hope that cover letters are not. You’d hope that cover letters are customized for the job. MATT: You would hope. [laughs] JASON: You would hope. I can tell you’ve done a bunch of hiring yourself. Yeah. So most of them are not. And those are immediate no-gos for us. If you want to work here and if you want to work at any job, I would say you need to write down why you want to work here, not just why you want a job. And from that, you can derive a lot of things as a hiring manager, as someone who is involved in the process, you can really tell where someone’s head is.  So writing is very important, and then we often give a lot of writing exercises through the job hiring process, depending on what it is, and continue to double down on that. And every time we’ve been hesitant about someone, their skills have been great but they weren’t great writers, it turned out that we probably shouldn’t have hired them. And the main reason why here is because most of our communication is written, almost. I’d say 95% of it is written.  MATT: Let’s say I was a colleague of yours at Basecamp and you were going to coach me or give me pointers to resources or something to become a better writer, how would you do that? JASON: My favorite book on writing is a book called Revising Prose, and the cover — I think it’s in the fifth edition now — the fifth edition cover is horrible. It’s a CD-ROM. It’s a picture of a CD-ROM, it’s the strangest cover of a writing book. But Richard Lanham is the author of Revising Prose, fifth edition.  It’s outstanding because it’s a book about writing sentences. It’s not about grammar really, it’s not about elements of style or rules, it’s about how to hone a sentence, how to get a sentence right, how to make a point. It’s a very, very good book. I’d recommend reading that first off and then I would write and write and write and write.  And I would work with you to review your writing, your headlines, your sentences, whatever you’re going to do and talk about, like, “We could say it this way or maybe you could say it this way. And if you said it this way, it would feel like this. And if you said it this way, it would feel like that.” I like to talk about feeling when it comes down to writing, so how does this come across, what does it make the reader feel, what does it elicit in them — that kind of stuff. But it’s the process of whittling something down and not losing any detail as you go, maybe even picking up detail as you go, until of course you hit a certain point and then it’s more of an academic, fun exercise to whittle it down to one sentence and one word. MATT: Basecamp has a pretty unique structure. Do you look to any other tech companies or outside of tech or companies in general that have inspired you to the structure of how you do things there?  JASON: I tend not to look at tech companies mostly because I think it’s healthier to look outside your own industry most of the time. We’re inspired by what you guys are doing at Automattic because you’re fully remote and you’ve been around for a long time. In broad strokes, I like to look at people who have been around for a long time because I feel like if you’ve been around for a long time, it’s not a fluke. MATT: I know you follow the watch world and I know you like… I think you like Cucinelli, actually. Are there any examples in that realm that you like? JASON: Yeah, Brunello Cucinelli, I don’t know him but I admire his ethos and how he runs his business. I consider him a mentor because of the way he runs his business and how he’s all about integrity and dignity. And there is a lot you can learn from that. You don’t need to talk to anybody to learn that from him. So I think there’s a lot of really wonderful examples.  In the watch world, the mechanical watch world, which I am a bit too absorbed in these days, there’s a lot of old businesses. I mean some of them are hundreds of years old, many of them are family-owned and have been passed down through generations. I just find it fascinating. To see how different generations do different things is fascinating to me. And to see how something can last beyond a generation. I always often think, well we’ve been in business 20 years, I’m 45 now. If we’re going to last another 20 years — which I hope we can, I’d love to — I’d be 65, I probably shouldn’t be running a software company at 65, it’s probably not the right thing to do. So what’s going to happen? Who is going to take over? How are we going to do that?   We haven’t really thought about succession planning but at some point you have to. It would be sort of a shame for a business to die with its founders just because they didn’t think about who else could do the work or anything like that. So it is interesting to think about how something can last beyond you, beyond your own generation, and also how it should change or shouldn’t change.  For example, in the watch world — the watch world is a very traditional world with arts and crafts and science passed down through generations, and a lot of that is very traditional, it doesn’t change very much. But then you have these upstart independents, and they are the ones who actually change things for the most part. And sometimes it takes someone brand new to change something.  Other times, you don’t want to change things. You’ve got to figure out “Can a software company not change?” Probably not. A restaurant probably could not change. MATT: I get super fascinated with companies or businesses that are able to do that multigenerational. JASON: Yes. MATT: So where there’s different leaders over time. Because that gets even harder, right? It’s one thing to have this passion yourself but to be able to pass that on and have it maintained or hopefully improve is really, really hard. All great companies I think are fractal. So how do I make a division at Automattic have what was great about Automattic when we were 30 or 40 people and that division can operate just like we were at that point. So that’s one way I think about scaling as well. The whole thing doesn’t have to be big because most people don’t have to keep the whole thing in their head, they just really work with their team or division or area. JASON: Yes, it’s so true. And the other thing that’s great about the fractal viewpoint is that you don’t have to change an entire organization to have an effect on it. You can change a corner of it, an edge of it, a branch of it, and then those other branches and those other corners and those other edges can look back at that change and go “Ohh, I want some of that too.” And that can carry through. It can sort of bleed into the rest of the business, which is great. MATT: And there was a point when we started to scale a little bit in terms of number of people, and also breadth and depth of what we were covering — that’s when I started to think about it a lot. It’s amazing how many companies will experiment and do a ton of A/B tests with their product or their customers but never really test internally how they work.  JASON: Yeah.  MATT: You know? Have two teams have the autonomy to work completely differently and then just judge it by the results. We even had a division which tried holacracy once. JASON: Oh yeah. MATT: Which was kind of the rage at the time. And I’d read about it and I’m like, “Hmm, I don’t know if I buy all this but I don’t know…”[laughs] JASON: Maybe, yeah. MATT: Let’s try it. They had to maintain their interface to the rest of the company, which is fine, because they were relatively self-contained, but internally they did a pretty substantial, maybe six or nine month experiment with holacracy, and it was actually really cool because coming out of it, they decided not to continue it, but they said “but this really worked well,” and “this is what we’re actually going to bring back,” kind of cherry-picking what they found to be the most effective part of it. JASON: What was that part?  MATT: Part of it, that we’ve adopted pretty much throughout the organization, is this idea of a DRI, or a Directly Responsible Individual. Someone owns everything, but people wear different hats but those hats are clear. I think it can be tough when those hats are not clear, or when someone has too much, they’re not explicit about what they’re doing, they take on too much and then become a bottleneck. So when you can be more explicit and transparent about those things, you can generally avoid those problems. Not always but at least it’s apparent where it is. JASON: We’ve even struggled with that. For a long time, we didn’t have titles here. We thought titles were what you do at big companies, you had titles. And then for a while we allowed everyone to make their own title, which was stupid, but we thought it was cool.  MATT: [laughs] We still do the own title thing.  JASON: Okay. [laughs] Well, stupid maybe is unfair. But let me say the reason we discovered that titles matter is actually, people have careers after Basecamp, and it’s tough when you don’t have a title that matches up with the rest of the world, in a sense, when someone else can look at your title and go, “Oh, I know where they are and what they have done and what position they’re in and where they’ve come from and the whole thing.”  So we decided to get extremely boring with titles. It’s like: junior programmer, programmer, lead programmer, senior programmer — boring titles. We also made sure everyone has one or had one. For a while people were like, “Oh I’m just a designer.” Well, no, you’re actually not. You’re a senior or principal designer. Other people should know where you are in the organization as well. MATT: Well it sounds like you’ve combined leveling with titles as well. JASON: We did. MATT: Did the leveling process always line up with where people thought they were? JASON: No. And that was the other thing is that when we ended up switching to standardized salaries across levels and across roles, we had to make a lot of things clear for everybody, so everyone knew where they stand and what salaries attach to each level and each role. So there’s no salary negotiations at Basecamp. If you’re a senior programmer, you get paid X. If you’re a lead designer, you get paid X. And that way you know that everyone else who’s a lead designer who does the exact same work you do — same skills, same experience — gets paid the exact same. MATT: And that’s regardless of geography? JASON: Regardless of geography. So we pay everybody 90th percentile San Francisco rates, even though we have nobody who lives in San Francisco. We basically want to pay the highest salaries in the industry. Of course 90% means there’s 10% that might be higher than you but that’s pretty high.  So that way you never have to wonder, you never have to hear — because things leak — “Why does Bill get paid $172,000 when I get paid $164,000? I thought we were both senior designers.” That stuff happens, people talk, and that’s where discontent begins to foment and it gets dangerous because people then don’t want to talk about it, and they hold resentments. And also, the other thing is that there is no reason why you have to be a great negotiator to get what you’re worth. It’s hard enough to be good at your job, and then to also be an ace negotiator doesn’t seem fair. People don’t like to negotiate for their cars, for their houses. I mean some people love it but —  MATT: And it’s asymmetric too because you know everyone’s salary and you do this all the time where they’re going to only do it once every time they change jobs or once a year or something. JASON: Bingo.  MATT: Yeah. JASON: Yeah, and think about a manager who manages 12 direct reports. Well this manager gets to practice a lot of salary negotiations while each individual person barely ever does, once every couple years, whatever it might be? And they’re going to be nervous and you’re going into someone else’s office. It’s hard.  We wanted to eliminate all that and with all that — this is kind of a bigger systemic change, which is unified salaries, leveling, and titles were all tied together — [we] just eliminated a whole bunch of questions and unease and — dis-ease, I should say. A few people didn’t like it because a few people thought they were worth more than the role or the level that they were at and I understand that. MATT: Did some people get adjusted down? JASON: No. So our policy was, nobody got adjusted down. What would happen was if anyone’s salary was above the level that they were placed in, their salary would be higher than everybody else’s, but they would never get a raise until everyone else caught up to them, basically.  So it was like, here’s your number, here’s where you’re at, maybe you’re $6000 more than someone — I’m making up numbers here — but $6000 more than someone else. You’re at 156 and everyone else is at 150. Other people are going to get raises as the industry moves and as the standard of living increases. You will not until they catch up to you and then you’ll all move in unison again. If the industry moves down, we will not move anybody down, we have made that promise as well. So you might not get a raise for many years until the industry catches back up again but that’s how we’ve set that up. So no one ever loses salary. MATT: How do you deal with foreign exchange? Because you must have people outside of USD. JASON: It depends on the role and — I should say the country, not the role, the country. Since exchange rates do fluctuate, basically they submit invoices every few weeks and some of that is adjusted based on if there is a significant fluctuation.  And the other thing that’s tricky is benefits. Because in some countries, for example, in most countries, pretty much every country, healthcare is included essentially. Here it’s not. So we pay people’s healthcare, or most of it. We pay 75%. So we do basically a cash-equivalency benefit to people who live in Canada or who live in Spain or something like that. So the numbers can’t be exact but they are really, really, really close and we do our best to make them as close as is reasonably possible.  MATT: As we wrap up, we’re coming up on ten years since Remote was published. JASON: Yeah. Wow.  MATT: Which is kind of wild. Now there’s a ton of companies doing remote too, so I would say it’s not “mission accomplished,” but it’s really shifted now where there’s a lot of companies. I’m hearing now from my investor friends that it’s actually the default now, even in the Bay Area. New companies are being built this way. JASON: That’s great. MATT: What do you feel like has changed the most and what do you really want to see change for companies operating in a remote or a distributed fashion? JASON: I’d like to say it’s technology and whatnot but I really actually don’t think it is. I think what ended up happening is that cost of living got so high in San Francisco and continues to get so high in San Francisco that it just doesn’t make a lot of sense for a lot of people to live there anymore. And so at some point if you want to find great talent, you’re going to have to look outside the walls of that city, and that region, because a lot of people just simply can’t afford to live there. And so you begin to realize that hey, there’s great people everywhere, all over the world. Amazing people.  And I think it just takes a few companies, like Stripe is a good example now. They’re opening up the remote HQ or whatever they’re calling it. Companies that are widely respected. Of course Automattic is widely respected, but you’ve always been this way so it’s more about the companies that have been all about [how] everyone’s got to be together. Those are the ones I think that people are looking to and [saying] “Oh wow, they are even considering going remote, that’s interesting.” Meanwhile, I think what you guys are doing is incredibly interesting, but you’ve been doing it for so long that things don’t become interesting anymore after you’re like, “This is what we do.” [laughter]  But yeah, to see someone like Stripe and other companies doing that, that gives other companies cover and investors cover to go “You know what, if they can do it, if they think it’s okay, if they’re going in the opposite direction of what they believed five, six years ago, then maybe this is okay. And you know what? We can find some great people. And guess what, there are great people. And wow, they’re finding great people, there is a whole world of great people, there is a lot less competition out there for great people when you can look at the whole world.” So I think all those things are finally beginning to happen. Like, video conferencing has been around forever, text messaging has been around forever. It’s not like some new tech came out. It’s really I think just an economic reality. And then of course just people getting more used to things and a new generation coming up that feels very comfortable with it, and some of the people who were very opposed to it are just going away, in a sense. They’re realizing, well other people can do it, and let’s give it a shot. So I hope to see it more and more and more. I think it’s wonderful for everybody involved. It’s, to me, the most respectful way to work. I have always found it borderline offensive that someone would have to lose their job because their partner that they live with had to go somewhere else to get a job.  So you’re living with someone and they have to go move to Madison, Wisconsin, because that’s where the work is. And you’re working for a company in Chicago but you’ve got to move because your partner has to move, and all the sudden you have to lose your job. Why? That seems so horrible for everybody.  It’s bad for the employer, because now they lost someone who was great and now they have to find someone new and train someone new and all that institutional knowledge is gone. And it’s bad for the employee who feels like they have to be chained to a city. And/or things far outside their control can cause them to lose a job that they might absolutely love, they might have spent their whole life trying to find this job and they got it and now they have to leave because someone else in their family has to go somewhere else. It feels so unfair. So I think remote is so fair. I think it’s important, really important, and I’m glad to see things changing. MATT: Jason, thank you so much. JASON: Thanks so much. Great to hear from you again and catch up in this way and hope to do it again soon. MATT: That was Basecamp’s Jason Fried. You can find him on Twitter at @jasonfried. That’s Jason F-R-I-E-D. He’s on Instagram at the same, but I believe he’s trying to quit both networks. So probably Basecamp’s website and the Rework and Remote podcast are the best places to find him. Basecamp has been building productivity tools for 20 years, which makes it pretty advanced for an independent tech company. In a world where many startups race to make it to the next funding round, sale, or IPO, it’s refreshing to see leadership that see themselves as long-term stewards of a company, mission, and most importantly, their users. I’m grateful to learn from folks like Jason who’ve been at it a lot longer than I have.  On the next episode of the Distributed podcast, I’ll be talking to Merritt Anderson, an HR veteran who advises companies about distributed work, among other things. She spent over four years in HR at GitHub, helping to build out their distributed teams and the policies that facilitated that work, and a really interesting hybrid model with a ton of success from both a user point of view and of course an outcome point of view. Thank you for listening, and see you next time. 

Read more of our 2019 takeaways in “Eight Lessons from the Distributed Podcast So Far.” Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. To close out the year, our host Matt Mullenweg is joined once again by Automattic’s Mark Armstrong to discuss the state of distributed work as we transition into a new decade. Matt discusses his key takeaways from his 2019 conversations on the podcast, and reflects on his year as the CEO of a growing distributed company.  The full episode transcript is below. *** MATT MULLENWEG: Howdy, howdy. Here we are. We made it: the last episode of 2019. The finale of our first season of the Distributed podcast, with me, Matt Mullenweg.  We’re currently in the thick of planning a fresh slate of episodes for next year. We’ve got the first female 4-star general in the U.S. Army, a guy who grew up in a family of Argentinian sheep ranchers and now runs a distributed blockchain company. Business leaders, thinkers… I’m really excited for next year overall.  But December is also a great time to reflect. So that’s what we’re going to do now — reflect on some of the great conversations we had in 2019 and talk about where we think distributed work is headed in 2020. Today I’m joined once again by my colleague Mark Armstrong, who works on a bunch of editorial things at Automattic. He’s been very involved in developing this podcast from day one. MARK ARMSTRONG: Hey Matt, how’s it going? MATT: Pretty good, pretty good. It is the end of the year so it’s exciting. I’m actually on my support rotation this week so if anyone contacts WordPress.com support they might get me. MARK: Yeah, feel free to take a break from this interview to do some live chats if you need to jump in there. [laughter] Well, Matt, thanks again for having me on. I have been enjoying the podcast all year and I am curious to understand some of your takeaways from the interviews on this podcast. And also, it’s been a big year for Automattic itself, so [I’d like] to understand a little bit about how the changes at Automattic have changed how we work as well. But first I want to go all the way back. I want you to tell me a little bit why you wanted to do this podcast in the first place. MATT: As we were scaling Automattic — and continue to scale — I meet and interview a lot of really fantastic leaders — in technology, outside of technology — who don’t know how the distributed thing works. And they have a ton of experience leading teams, running products, etcetera, but not in a distributed manner.  And so it’s combined with two things happening. One, there are more and more distributed companies than ever, all over the world, many who we’ve had on the podcast already, a lot who are coming up, that were showing that it works and that you could create a world-changing, ultra-competitive company without even a single central office. And two, there weren’t as many materials or information for how to run something larger than a small team or a freelancer but smaller than the whole thing. I guess the target audience for me for this [podcast] is really managers. People who are managing maybe for the first time, maybe for a long time, distributed teams. Just having that point of reference for how other companies do it and what are the best practices they can take away from it. I also hope that people at Automattic are listening to this. [laughs] Many of our colleagues are people who are in this very situation. And the first line of our creed is “I’ll always be learning,” and so I hope that people have been learning from this because I know I certainly have been. MARK: I think it helps clarify what we think and what we believe about how we work, day in and day out, just hearing the other perspectives from the other companies and the other executives or product people within those teams on how they work similarly or differently from us has been hugely helpful. I think you hit on another point too, which is a lot of the remote work materials that are out there right now are very much about selling the lifestyle versus looking at the reality of what’s happening inside. Do you find that’s the case? MATT: The lifestyle is definitely part of what I think attracts people to it. But it’s not the lifestyle people expect. It’s more about autonomy, control. I think sometimes people get this idea of Remote Year or something where people are in a different city every other day or every week or every month. And very, very few people who do remote work actually work that way, which is interesting. MARK: Yeah. Now you very intentionally avoid using the term remote work in favor of distributed work. Can you explain why that is? MATT: Well, “remote” is appropriate sometimes. It’s also a little bit — it rolls off the tongue a little easier than “distributed.” But I think what we are trying to build at Automattic and many other companies we talk to, is a truly distributed organization. So “remote,” even the word itself, implies that there is a “central” — a bunch of people in one place and there’s a few people who are remote. When you’re building a truly distributed company, you want to have all nodes on the graph to be equal. So for no one to be remote, for everyone to be equally participating. I would say even if you have an office, and technically you could describe people who aren’t there as remote, you don’t want them to feel remote, right? Almost no one has ever said “Oh, I hope I feel more remote today.” They want to feel connected, they want that equality of interaction and inclusion.  So that’s really, really important for everyone who’s working with anyone not physically with them to make them feel included. And I think the more we can get away from the term “remote” the more we can help people feel included. Another thing that has really changed for Automattic is we have gone from around 800 people to closer to 1200 people, so it has been a year of big growth. And of course with the acquisition of Tumblr, we acquired a company which had a very strong presence in New York City, and in fact we now have a pretty substantial office in New York City.  If you listen over the course of the year, before and after that, I started asking a lot more questions about hybrid organizations where they’re partially distributed and partially in-office, and what the best practices are for that. And something fun for me in the podcast is just being able to ask really, really smart, experienced people what’s on my mind and what challenges we’re facing. And that is something that’s been a new challenge and new learning for Automattic this year. MARK: Yeah, I think it’s been fascinating. So this was an acquisition that went through in September, Tumblr joining Automattic, and close to 200 plus employees joining Automattic. So that is a big influx of employees that even within a fully distributed organization can change the culture. But now, on top of that, you’ve got an actual office in New York City in which they’re working in that culture. It has only been a couple months so far but what have you learned about the merging or not merging of those cultures? MATT: It has definitely taught me that we can’t take anything for granted. It actually made me think how much more important the Distributed blog and this podcast are because things that I haven’t thought about for years are — like how best to do calls or conference calls or meetings or things like that, that are inclusive of remote folks and people who are in the room, are not always widely known and might not even be widely agreed on. This is why in the episode with Anil Dash this came up pretty well, it also came up pretty well in an episode with Merritt from GitHub. So these topics that you’ll hear throughout some of the different episodes, both past and future.  It made me also realize that culture is so much more than what goes on in an office. It’s really the sum of what everyone does all the time — all those little decisions, the way people communicate, the way people text, expectations for how you reply to things, how meetings happen. Meetings are such a huge part of it. It’s what people are doing when no one else is looking that really makes up culture.  And it’s something I’ve always subconsciously missed is thinking that there’s more culture in an office. I wouldn’t say there’s more, there is just a different culture in an office. It’s a culture of that ambient intimacy, a very different type of connection that develops between colleagues when you’re in person versus when you’re not. And it has been so long since I’ve closely interacted with an in-person team that I hadn’t really thought about a lot of those things in a while.  MARK: Are you doing that now with the Tumblr team? Do you pay many visits to the office? What is your plan around that? MATT: Yeah, I’ve been trying to make it into their office really whenever I’m in New York City. And that has been really great to be able to make one of those connections. I have also realized that they were a hybrid organization even before they joined Automattic. So they have some great colleagues in Dulles, in Richmond, in LA, in Seattle, and some folks just kind of sprinkled all over the country and the world, so that’s also been really great.  I feel like those people have taken extremely quickly to some of the things that Automattic does, including things like P2, and that’s been pretty exciting to watch. Some of our closest integrations have been so far on just the systems side because we’re migrating all the data from Tumblr. It’s billions and billions, maybe hundreds of billions or trillions of posts, and users and things like that that are all coming over. So our systems teams have been working pretty closely together. And I would say systems is also a field or a role where people tend to be very comfortable communicating online.  MARK: Yeah, a couple big ceremonial moments that I have witnessed from Tumblr joining Automattic is the first P2 post and the entire company joining Slack and the point at which we decided, like, oh these divisions should all be on the same Slack together. I’m sure there were a lot of meetings around that, correct?  MATT: It actually ended up being a technically driven decision as much as anything where I guess they had maintained their own Slack in the past, and that was a good thing, but it turned out it was going to be hard or even impossible to migrate most of that data, so we were like, “Well the data, the archives can’t come over, we might as well just get everyone on the same thing.” Because we had a lot of overlap already. MARK: One of the other things you mentioned in the Anil Dash episode that I found fascinating was the concept that when they’re working together in a physical office they’re not really supposed to talk about work. [laughs] Is that something that you think there is a takeaway from that can be applied within Automattic? MATT: My big takeaway — and we haven’t tried this yet with Tumblr but perhaps we will at some point — is that idea which you’ll hear in the Merritt episode. One face, one voice, the idea that if you’re on a call, if you’re on a Zoom, wherever it is, if you can have each little box, there would be one face and one voice versus a conference room or something like that, it really does make the conversation flow a lot better.  MARK: Yeah, that makes a huge difference when you’re on a Zoom, and there is also a little bit of FOMO that happens on the Zooms that I’ve been on where there’s a group of people having a good time together, and you’re watching from your silo and feeling like, “Oh that looks like a fun party, I wish I was there.” MATT: [laughs] But I do think that Anil was very articulate on the importance of building those non-work connections as well. It’s something we try to do. At Automattic teams do meetups a few times per year and once a year we bring a lot of the company, the majority of the company together, [and figure out] how to leverage that in-person time for that connection. A number of people who weren’t part of the Tumblr team but part of Automattic have been rotating to work on Tumblr, both to help integrate the systems and also just accelerate hiring things.  MARK: Now in a lot of the conversations you’ve had this season you’ve spoken to what I would call strong founders or people who had the control and the power within the company to shape it into whatever culture they deem best. I think a lot about how distributed work expands beyond very specific companies into this broader movement growing among mid-size and large companies and how exactly does this work when it comes to bringing distributed into a company where maybe it’s a 50-year old company on its tenth CEO? How do you get to a place where those companies really start to get into this? MATT: It’s funny because companies that old typically have multiple offices so they have a version of the distributed problem already, you know?  MARK: Mhm. MATT: What I see is probably the most important thing to unlock is this idea of getting everyone around the table [being] the best way to solve a problem. That assumes being in person and being synchronous is definitely a way to solve a problem, but I see many companies, particularly older companies or managers with experience in older-style companies, see that as the only way to solve those problems. I do think that there are asynchronous ways and of course non-physically collocated ways that can actually be far superior in many situations to solve many or most problems that businesses face. I don’t consider it my personal mission to switch all companies to be able to do this but partially that’s because I feel that companies that don’t do this will die off. [laughs] So there will be a Darwinian process where companies who are able to tap into the global talent market and work asynchronously and efficiently all over the world.  That’s where business is going to be and that’s how things are going to expand. Even if you have a coffee shop, if you have any ambitions to have multiple of them, you’ll need to start to expand your culture, expand the way you work, expand the way you collaborate, expand the way that insights move from customers to process to design, to innovation in a distributed fashion. I would be astounded, completely astounded, if five, ten years from now Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Netflix, the tech giants that we think of, didn’t have distributed work as a major, if not the major, part of the way their employees work together. MARK: It’s interesting. Also the broader movement of companies, if they are spreading out beyond the bigger urban centers. There’s this tipping point that has to occur as well, and this goes back to another thing from Anil’s episode. We have always compared Automattic’s distributed model to — maybe it’s a Silicon Valley company with a big campus in a boring suburban area of Mountain View or Menlo Park.  And he’s saying, “Here you get to live in New York City and people want to live in New York City and that’s exciting!” So cost of living aside, there is this gravitational pull of the big, exciting, urban centers bringing people in. So it feels like maybe there has to be a tipping point still for these companies to take that plunge and to get those workers to want to spread out in other places. MARK: I think that trend and that story will be so fascinating to see play out over the 2020s as well. Because there’s a lot of data that shows pretty much all the job growth, all the economic activity that has happened in America through this incredible bull run has been really concentrated in urban centers. And if you correlate that with things that are happening politically or frustration or — there’s all sorts of things that could be correlated with that economic activity. When you start to spread that economic opportunity throughout America, throughout the world, [think about] how that changes those centers. Part of the reason New York is one of the best cities in the world is it’s a center for so many different industries. There’s great jobs there that support great quality-of-life things — great arts, great restaurants, great everything.  As you start to get more of that economic abundance flowing to other places, guess what, that supports other jobs, other restaurants, other arts, other things that people will consider part of a great quality of life — schools, parks, etcetera — in other places as well. And in fact, places where you might not have the problem of San Francisco being on a small peninsula, Manhattan being an island, you know, the kind of geographic constraints that you do in some of these urban centers.  MARK: Thinking about this on the broader scale, should there be a government role in promoting distributed work? I feel like we see some novelty initiatives, like Vermont’s remote worker program, where they’ll give people $10,000 to move there. Have you thought about what city, states, and government should be doing?  MATT: They absolutely, crucially should be doing programs like Vermont’s. If you think of the brain drain problem, where some of the smartest, most successful people leave where they grew up, which has also economic implications and everything, anything you can do to bring those people back is huge. Economic incentives are definitely one way. I think that there’s also streamlined regulation. And then finally, just incredible broadband [laughter] and normal things you would invest in, in a city, to make quality of life good, like great schools, I think are really, really powerful. And we see it so much with our colleagues — people like to move back to where they’re from and where their family is, and that can be such a powerful thing. I don’t know if I were coming from scratch to America and looking at the top 20 cities if Houston would be at the top of my list to live in. [laughs] But because I’m from there I have such a connection to the place. I grew up there, it’s a formative part of my history. My oldest friends and family are there. It kind of beats out every other place in the world because of those things.  Because I can get cool music, cool food, cool other things that you can get in New York, San Francisco, etcetera, I can get that in Houston but I can’t get those people [elsewhere]. So I think that draw of where you’re from could be great to reverse the brain drain that happens very naturally all over the world and all over America. MARK: Are there moments from this season and in conversations with other companies and with our own Automatticians where you think to yourself, “Wow, we are doing this part all wrong?” MATT: [laughs] That’s a good question. I’ve definitely been challenged and learned new things every episode. We could almost go through them one by one. But even some of the more out there stuff, like John Vechey talking about how they’re collaborating over VR. That just got me really, really excited about how much better than the gold standard today — which is probably Zoom — we could have, to connect and feel presence with each other.  I really enjoyed our episode, episode four, where we dove into some of the history. Leo Widrich, talking about the downsides, the isolation of distributed work. His and Arianna’s episode, talking about the downsides [of distributed work], I really like those as well, and I hope to have some more of those in the next season where we talk about people who do not agree with this. Because I think that that actually sharpens the ideas quite a bit.  Stephen Wolfram kind of blew my mind. I don’t know if you remember that one? MARK: Oh yeah. He has been doing this for almost, what, 30 years plus? What were some of the lessons from that conversation?  MATT: One of the things I took away from that is the investment — making the internal tools, which also makes me think there is an incredible business opportunity to create tools which natively incorporate remote people and distributed people much, much better, because a lot of the stuff for running companies currently doesn’t. Even things like Google Calendar, which still has meeting rooms built in, and things like that. You could imagine the next generation of this being so much nicer for getting people together. If you’re in an office, you could walk around and pull five people into a meeting. The distributed version of that is kind of tricky. You end up Slacking each other and trying to pick a time and things like that. And Automattic is not too bad because people aren’t in too many meetings, so sometimes they can hop on things with a short notice.  But it would be nice to have a way that pops something up and you can raise your hand — I’m available, I’m not available. And then when you reach some quorum of people who need to be at this thing, you can all just immediately hop on a call or something. And making that a little more ad hoc and on demand versus everything having to be so pre-scheduled, which sometimes can be tricky.  I think a lot about speed of iteration and anything that introduces any lag time into particularly decision-making slows companies down. And you really start to look at places that are moving slower than they need to, you often find these little things, these little one-day, two-day delays that just add up to be weeks and months and then eventually years of things moving slower than a more agile team would be able to. MARK: I recall you’ve called that chess by mail in the past.  MATT: Yes. Now in an office you can get the opposite problem where it is so interrupt-driven that people can’t get real work done, that deep work that Cal Newport talks about, who actually would be a cool person to get on the podcast now that we mention it. When you have too many interruptions, it’s really, really difficult to get things done.  MARK: Yeah, it seems like Slack is still the main place where an impromptu discussion can happen, but again, it’s got some pros and cons there. This year was probably the first time I started to feel personally some real tension around time zones in Slack, and it became apparent to me that Slack is not the best on the time zone front. What’s your take on how to move beyond that? MATT: It’s an interesting question because I also feel like 2019 was the year where I felt like for — at least for us — Slack went from being a net contributor to our productivity, to a net detractor. We probably need to do a reset around our norms, around not being signed into Slack all the time, do not disturb notifications, not needing to reply. That just resets that a little bit more for us.  One idea we’ve toyed around with and discussed before is just every person, regardless of your role, not signing into these real-time communications for the first couple hours of their day. So you’re still working but staying off email, Slack, other things that are more communication-driven and really looking at, “What’s the most important thing for me to get done today?” and really checking that off the list. MARK: It’s interesting when you talk about cultural norms. Cate Huston from Automattic talks a little bit about autonomy, and the choose-your-own-adventure nature of some of this work, or how different teams work. And I wondered, should we be asserting ourselves more to new employees when people come in pushing the Automattic Way? I think it has been great in terms of people coming in and being able to define what works best for them and their team, but I also wonder whether some of the things that have previously been proven to work have been maybe not completely bought into. MATT: One hundred percent. And that is something — we’re going to make a lot of changes to Distributed.blog next year, and I’d like to get some — almost like some free manager courses. Maybe we can use the Sensei plugin for WordPress.  Also, Automattic could be 100 times better at this. I was really impressed with some of the stories of how Glitch, how InVision, how others do onboarding, for both new employees or periodically bringing existing people through things.  Training is an area where we’ve only scratched the surface. And actually one of the hires I’m most excited about that we made in 2019 at Automattic was our new Head of Learning and Development, Michael Norman, whose learning and development is looking at this problem around onboarding, feedback, skill-sharing — everything to do with knowledge, which in a knowledge-worker company is something that I think we could be a lot more deliberate on.  And, of course, in Automattic fashion, whatever we figure out we will try to open source. MARK: Excellent. One other big thing with Automattic was Automattic raised $300 million this year from Salesforce Ventures. And I’m curious what fundraising is like when you’re a company with no central headquarters.  MATT: [laughs] I think it throws some people off.  MARK: Those coffee shop meetings are a little difficult?  MATT: Yes, yes. So it is nice to have a dedicated space where you can go — you can bring people into. The reality is also a lot of these things, you’re going to their office. [laughs] But it is nice. There was a time maybe in previous Automattic fundraising when we did have an office, people would come into this empty office and you could almost see it run through their head, “Hey, is this a real company? Is this a pyramid scheme or something? There’s no one here.” So that’s all gone. That doesn’t really pop up as much anymore.  But for me, I would say the distributed aspect can make it a little more challenging. I spent a lot of time on planes this year, going to those meetings. It also drew me away from the product and engineering work that is my native talent, or thing I’m drawn to, certainly my history with WordPress and Automattic, and it took me away from that a little more than I would like for the year. But it was super, super important. This fundraising really sets up Automatic’s independence for the foreseeable future and allows us to invest in what I think the opportunity is, and other people agree, is a really, really huge tens-of-billions-of-dollars opportunity out there. It allows us to go for it but the actual fundraising process is one which is, well, just incredibly inefficient in so many ways. And I hope to see things change there more in the future, particularly for private companies.  MARK: With the fundraising process, did you have a period in the past where you had to spend a lot of that time rationalizing the distributed model compared to this time where it’s more, “Of course, of course you have a distributed team, now let’s talk about the business,” kind of thing?  MATT: It’s completely changed. So I think both at the high end and the low end. At the high end you have companies, like many of the ones that we had this season — InVision, GitLab, GitHub, Toptal — there’s so many out there that really show — Upwork — an incredible scale. So you’re getting to thousands of employees, billions in revenue often, with the distributed team. So people aren’t really worried at that end anymore. But the other thing that I think has changed is that folks who work also at the seed level — so invest in seed and series A — and a lot of these investors look at companies both large and small, I’m hearing from investors at that end that almost every company is, if not doing a distributed model, then a hybrid model. So maybe the founders are in San Francisco.  And by the way, if you’re a founder or a CEO, I do think you need to be where the other companies in your space are, or where the funders are going to be or things like that. So there is going to be a lot of time in those clusters of those things — technology clusters in our industry that you’ll need to beat. But they are not hiring in the Bay Area anymore and they’re not even trying to.  If you draw that line out a few years, there’s going to be 10 or 100 times as many fully distributed, ultra-successful, large-scale companies five years from now than there are today. And that is exciting.  And one of the things I wanted to do on Distributed.blog is have a company directory that talks about a few public stats about the scale and approach that some of these companies we have mentioned and had on the podcast have taken, and then of course if they have been on the podcast we can link to it. That I think will be dozens of companies today. And at some point we’re probably going to need to retire it over the coming years, it will just be too many. I also like it as an idea, though, as kind of a no-fee jobs board. There are some jobs boards dedicated to the distributed work, but I think just the links to the companies, because all companies have hiring pages, could be kind of a nice thing for people who are looking to switch to work in one of these. And then to the extent that the founder or CEO or HR person or someone from the company has been on the podcast, what a great way to learn about the culture and approach of the company. MARK: Speaking of jobs, what are some tips, what’s a script for people to use if they want to, if they are out job hunting, and they want to make sure they’re building in remote work as a piece of their job? I feel like a lot of distributed work in the future is going to be driven by worker demand, which is insisting that remote work is a piece of what’s available to them, or flexible work. What are some tips that you have to bring this up in the hiring process? MATT: One tip I do give, sometimes we see people for whom the bulk of their application is that they want to be remote. And that’s not really compelling on the other side of the table. [laughs] This is just general advice for applying for anything. But if you can make your application about why you’re excited about the mission of the company — the products, what you feel is your unique contribution to the products, and the mission and the vision for where the company is going, your experience with a technology stack or their products, or you’re a user, how you supported it. Those sorts of things.  So if you can really personalize the application — I hate to say it, but that would put you ahead of 95% of applicants. You’d be surprised how much of applying for a job is very much spray and pray, where people are obviously just sending out their application to dozens, if not hundreds, of people or companies without much personalization. Some of my favorites for applying for Automattic is when people actually make a WordPress website and they make a little mini website about their application or about wanting the job. In fact, we had a colleague of ours, Dave, who was previously a designer at Automattic and then reapplied, and I think he must have known that because he made a website for his reapplication. So in addition to his going to the top of the list because he was an awesome colleague before, it showed that he wanted the job. And that really means a lot. There’s some advice, if you’re in an in-office job and you’d like to have some more flexibility, that I might have first read in Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Work Week, which was forever ago. But first, be amazing at your job. [laughs] If you’re clearly one of the highest performing people on your team, I think that gives you a lot of built-in credibility and currency.  And then talk to your boss, your manager, about maybe taking a day a week. And once you get that permission, make sure that day you work even harder than the days you’re in the office, so that it’s really, really clear that there is no downside to the company. If you’re not really respecting the work part of remote work, it can ruin it for your team or the whole company, where people start to associate it with slacking off.  So if you can set a good example there, and make sure to hold any colleagues accountable — that if they aren’t going to be in the office, they need to contribute just as much if not more — that helps a lot for warming up organizations to be more inclusive of that non-in-office approach.  MARK: I want to go to InVision CEO Clark Valberg and your episode with him, talking about the mental models that we build of the people we interact with and how face time helps us increase the fidelity of those mental models. Have you ever been in a situation where you’re having a conversation with someone, text, audio, or even video, [when] you thought they felt a certain way and then, once you meet with them face to face, realized you had the totally wrong impression? MATT:  A hundred percent. Although, I will say that that comes more from text than audio or video. Audio is actually — particularly when it’s high fidelity, like you’re not on “Can you hear me now, can you hear me now,” it’s a good connection, good microphone like we’re using — you can get so much from someone’s tone of voice, their approach, etcetera. It’s really much higher bandwidth. [With] text, even the best emoji users don’t always communicate as well, and it’s very easy to bring your own point of view or your own view of how things are going into the conversation. So you might view something as being annoyed or short or curt when it’s not. So the ability to hop quickly onto an audio call or a video call is really key for compensating for that misreading, which is very natural in text communication. MARK: I think this is the second time we’ve hit on something where it’s like there is a need for an impromptu call or an impromptu video conversation that is not so rigid in these scheduled Google calendar slots. Whoever solves this will be in good shape. Going back to Leo Widrich, formerly of Buffer. He talks a bit about isolation, and for me that’s one of those things I read about but I feel like I wouldn’t know if it’s actually impacting me in a negative way because it is such a slow creep when it’s happening. Do you grapple with isolation in your own work and life?  MATT: I am 16 years into working with people remotely from the start of WordPress, maybe even a little bit before that. So I feel like for me, I have a lot of experience now both developing online relationships — the kind of chatter and back and forth that can help deepen that — but also having a strong social network outside of that. I think that’s very much key. One thing that can happen really nicely if you’re around people you work with every day and you like them, is that also turns into your friendships and your social network. I think that can be really positive, it can also be a mixed bag. It can make it more difficult to give critical performance feedback or if someone gets a promotion, that can change the dynamics of people who used to be peers, now being managers or responsible for compensation, or whatever it might be.  It’s really nice to have friendships that are just friendships. Neither of you is economically entangled with the other or reporting to the other or any of those other things that introduce a layer of complexity into human relationships.  So I encourage everyone, even if you really love the people you collocate with every day, to have that. It’s actually one of the cool things I think about co-working is because you can be physically present with people who aren’t at the same company as you, you can have that, get the best of both worlds, get the people who you like going to lunch with a few times a week, and learn from different companies, but not actually overlap in your work-work. Now, the one thing I do miss — it’s almost like the opposite of what Anil suggested where he said no talking about work at office lunches. I do feel like the catch-up over a meal with a colleague does get you something in terms of the zeitgeist of what’s going on in their part of the company or the world, which is hard to recreate any other way, part of the reason I find it so valuable to have a less formal catch-up with colleagues. MARK: To that same point — Automattic: too many in-person meetups or not enough in-person meetups? MATT: I might have to look at the data to see exactly how many we’re doing. I know that we got to a point where we might have had too many a few years ago and we decided to start dialing it back a little bit. Not in a super explicit way but maybe moving teams from every nine months, from every six months, or even greater cadences than a year to balance out the total amount of travel time that people are doing. But I don’t know, I don’t think it’s the amount of meetups, it’s how you use the time. MARK: Yes. Several of your guests talk quite a bit about that, in which thinking about the time as a very specific thing, and only addressing the things that can only happen in person versus trying to get a lot of work done, or a specific project that you probably could have done on your own, from your own homes.  MATT: Where I see teams get negative feedback on their meetups is often where [there] was a mismatch of expectations. If your goal in the meetup is to bond as people and get to know each other better, make that the intention going in, and then everyone is expecting that. I get sometimes that we’re, some people were expecting to have a hackathon meetup and some people were expecting to have a team bonding meetup and the distance between whatever actually happens ends up being dissatisfaction for folks.  I think that you also need to be explicit about the goals and what you’re going to try, because people, rightly, are taking [time] away from their family and their home, so they want to feel like there is something that they’re getting out of it that they couldn’t have done in a distributed manner. So by being explicit about those goals ahead of time, you also have that conversation about other ways you can solve that problem, things you can do before the meetup to try to address it. And I think it’s still okay if you try something and it doesn’t work in a meetup. I actually find that people have a lot of open-mindedness to an agreed-upon goal, trying something new, and it’s not going to work 100% of the time, you know? We definitely do this at our Grand Meetups. I tell people, “Hey, we’re going to try a bunch of new stuff this year, it’s not all going to work, that’s okay, that’s how we’re going to find the things that do work and we’ll do them again.” And the things that don’t work, now we’ve eliminated that from the possible solution space and next time we can say “Alright we tried that, it didn’t work, we’re going to try something different to solve this problem.”  So it’s okay if things don’t work if you have the shared expectation about something being an experiment and what the actual goal was going in. MARK: Great. Matt, thanks again for sharing your experiences with us. MATT: This has been very exciting. I also want to take this opportunity to thank you and the team that has made the Distributed.blog website, the podcast just a really, really rich resource. I love reading the posts that Cole and others do for each episode. I get something out of it that actually wasn’t in the audio, which I think is a real testament to [how] we’re trying to make the learnings available to as many people as possible and hopefully shift how work is done all over the world, which I think will be a positive impact on the globe. MARK: So there is a lot more coming from the podcast in 2020. Matt will be speaking with author Morra Aarons-Mele about what distributed work means for introverted people, Merritt Anderson from GitHub on how distributed work can empower people with non-traditional backgrounds, Ann Dunwoody, the U.S. Army’s first female four-star general on running logistics on what might be the world’s largest distributed organization, Xapo CEO Wences Casares on the future of work on the blockchain, and many more. MATT: Thank you to Mark Armstrong for joining me today, and for the folks at Automattic and Charts & Leisure who make this podcast happen. Most of all, thanks to you, the listeners, for spending your time with us every couple of weeks. It’s been a joy for me personally to hear our guests’ stories, and I’m honored you’ve chosen to invite us into your device to share them with you.  We’re going to hear a lot more great stories about the future of work in 2020, and it’s going to be pretty awesome. On the next episode I’ll be speaking with Basecamp CEO Jason Fried about the frantic pace that defines life at many startups, and whether or not it has to be that way, and how distributed work might help to alleviate that pressure. Basecamp, formerly known as 37signals, was one of the pioneers of distributed work and their book, Remote, is still one of the best ones out there.  I’d like to wish a happy, happy holidays to everybody celebrating this time of year. Thank you for listening, and see you in the next decade. 

Read more about Anil Dash in “To Remake Tech, Remake the Tech Company“ Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. Anil Dash didn’t like the direction the web was going, so he joined a tech company that promised to take web development back to its indie roots. That company became Glitch, a semi-distributed company based in New York City. In this episode, Matt and Anil talk about the good old days of blogging and how the ideals of those pioneers inform the way Glitch treats its employees and its product.  The full episode transcript is below. *** MATT MULLENWEG: A lot of tech companies talk about prizing “people over profits,” but Glitch is a startup that is serious about these ideals, and holds itself publicly accountable for sustaining this commitment as the company grows. That’s partially because Glitch’s CEO is Anil Dash. Anil’s an old acquaintance of mine — he’s one of the early pioneers of blogging. Over the last twenty years he’s developed a reputation as something of a tech prophet — not just for predicting what’s going to happen next, but for holding the industry’s feet to the fire.  Glitch is a partially-distributed company that runs a social platform for building and sharing web applications. To do that, they’ve developed a workplace environment that centers around employees’ well-being. I’m interested to hear from him how his company has aimed to go beyond platitudes and create a genuinely equitable and respectful workplace, and to learn where their semi-distributed structure fits into that goal.  Alright, let’s get started.  MATT: Anil, you have been blogging forever. ANIL DASH: [laughs] Roughly, yes. In geological time, it’s short, but in human years it’s 20 years. MATT: How did you start and what keeps you going? ANIL: People in my life were tired of hearing me rant about things. So they were like, “Go put it somewhere else.” [laughs] And at the time I had a really long commute. I was commuting by train an hour and a half each way. I mean it was really — it was like three hours a day on a train and I was going nuts. MATT: Wow. ANIL: You didn’t have Wi-Fi back then. So I had a giant Dell laptop and I was like, “I’ve got to learn how to do more with HTML.” I knew the basics but I wanted to do it. I would do it, literally just practicing on local on my laptop, on Internet Explorer 5 or something, whatever it was at the time, and I thought “Oh, I could take these rants in my head and put them out here onto the internet.”  Right about the time that I had that idea in maybe summer of ’99, I saw the first couple sites. I was like, “Oh, this is what I could do. I could organize it this way.” I saw Peter Merholz’s site, PeterMe, and then very quickly discovered a couple of others. And so these pioneers were doing it, and I thought, I don’t think I can write like them but I think I’ve got something to say.  It really felt like it was the right time too because I had started in maybe July and by September the Pyra team had built Blogger and the Danga team had built LiveJournal. Even just the fact that there was software to me meant “OK, this is legit.” MATT: So 20 years later? ANIL: 20 years later. MATT: Dashes.com. ANIL: Yes. MATT: Why do you blog now? ANIL: One, it’s part of how I think. My wife will always say, “You’re staring off into space like you’re writing something.” She just knows that it’s this thing where I’m collecting my thoughts. Certainly one of the most important things to me is, I think better and organize my thoughts better and share my ideas better when I write it, and it introduces a rigor to what I’m sharing. I love that push to accuracy and push to quality. It makes my thinking stronger.  Some of it’s just, I like to write. For a long time, I had no other place to do it. I was lucky, after I had written a million words online people asked me to write for things. [laughter] You know? I got a column in Wired and I was like, “Where were you all ten years ago?” MATT: Cool. ANIL: But nobody was trying to hire me to write so I might as well put it out there. And that’s still true. MATT: What would make you stop blogging? ANIL: Well I’ve slowed down. So I would say the thing that slows me down is, well, life, right? So I’ve got to spend time with my child and I’ve got a company to run and I’ve got — the priorities have shifted. I can’t just say I’m going to stay up all night and finish this 3,000-word piece like I used to.  But at the same time, the biggest thing chipping away at it is having other venues and other platforms. I resisted doing a podcast for the first 15 years of the medium. [laughs] I think the week podcasts were invented somebody was like, “You should go do one,” and I was like, “Ah, I don’t know.” MATT: And now you have your own little studio. ANIL: Yeah, exactly. Then I started thinking about the craft that… The same is true actually of other social media. Like Twitter in particular I spend a lot of time on. And this is a strange thing to say but I think you’re probably one of the few people who can appreciate it — I care about being good at it. I think people are like, “That’s an absurd thing to say,” like, “Isn’t this disposable, isn’t this ephemeral?” I don’t feel that way at all. I have Twitter threads that have been going for six years. I am very mindful of how I use my audience, who I retweet and who I amplify.  So I think very much of that as a body of work too. I never delete tweets. Again, same thing, I am certain somebody is going to go back and be like, “You said this thing that’s terrible,” and hopefully I’ve learned since then. But I very much want there to be a body of work between all the things I’ve done that I look at on a years — and now decades — timescale. I don’t think very many people look at their YouTube channel or their Snapchats [that] are like “Yeah, how is this going to age in 20 years?” But I have that luxury so I try to do what I do with that in mind. MATT: As you mentioned, you’re running a company now — Glitch. ANIL: Yes. MATT: How is that culture of blogging or writing part of Glitch’s culture? ANIL: So Glitch is the latest name and current incarnation of a company that started as Fog Creek Software in the year 2000, founded by Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor. Joel is, to me, one of the all-time legends of blogging, one of the greatest people to ever do it. Joel started Joel on Software in ’98, I think. MATT: Super early, yes. ANIL: Yes. I would read Joel’s blog and he would talk about a company where they cared about the software they made, cared about how they treated their people, were very thoughtful about the work that they did. They did not want to be just another dot-com, which at the time that was what was in vogue. I thought, “Wow, that would be an amazing place to work.” And also, “I would never pass their coding test.” That was the other thing I thought about the company. And in late ’99 — December ’99 — they had a blogger’s dinner in New York City, which is a funny thing to say because the premise was —   MATT: Of all the bloggers. ANIL: All the bloggers, right. And we fit around two tables in a Mexican restaurant. You fast forward over the next 10 years and they had built some products and really established a culture, and Joel reached out and it was just like, “We’ve got something to show you.”  I saw the prototype of what became Glitch. You could have live-in-your-browser code. And as you coded and typed your code out, it would live-deploy without you having to run anything, do anything, touch anything. You didn’t have to ask somebody down the hall for the access to the AWS account. It just worked. I still have the notes from that first meeting, and we were looking at them not long ago, we had had some folks join and I wanted to show them where it all came from. That first meeting that we had of the demo of it was — we talked about, well, we need to have a social network wrapped around this so you can find the apps, and you need to be able to remix the apps so you can redo it, and we need to have multiplayer editing, so more than one person can edit at the same time. And we had this list, and we made these bullet points in the first hour, all of which we did, all of which are the heart of the Glitch experience.  It was really like few moments in my career. It actually felt a lot like when we first saw blogs. I first saw the blogging tools and it was like, “Oh, this is going to be it. This is… I don’t know if what we’re building is going to be the way it happens, but this way of creating the web is going to be how we make the web.” It was really, really clear. I remember really early on, when I was talking to Mena Trott, who had led the creation of Moveable Type, and was one of the bloggers that influenced me most, with her voice and her tone. I had said, “Someday there’s going to be a million blogs.” And she just looks at me and she’s like, “You dumb ass, there’s going to be like a hundred million,” you know? [laughter] And it was just such a great, both affirmation, and also “This is so much bigger than we can imagine.”  I had that feeling with Glitch, which was — I think a lot of us had lamented the web we make. That we have apps on our phones, and what I always experienced with the apps on my phone. Everybody complains about [how] the algorithms aren’t fair, and there’s all kinds of awful content being shared, and misinformation and these things. What I miss most is, I look at my phone and I look at the apps and I don’t know who made any of them. MATT: Hmm. ANIL: It used to be [that for] every website I went to, I knew the person, and I knew what they liked, and I knew why they made it the way they made it, and what their peccadillos were. I mean, I still go to Daring Fireball and I’m like, “Damn it, John Gruber, the font is still too small. [laughter] I mean we are so much older now, just nudge the type size a little bit bigger,” you know? I’m sure he’s been finessing the font for 17 years to find exactly the right size but he’s not ready to commit yet. [laughter]  But ultimately I come away and I’m like “That’s fine, I know exactly why it is what it is, I know his personality is captured in every pixel on that screen.” And then the stuff I spend my time tapping on, on my phone, has none of that. It doesn’t have people behind it, I don’t know the peccadilloes.  I always use the analogy of food. Every meal I remember in my life was made by people I love who were — maybe it was a part of a tradition, like our culture. I know where the ingredients came from, I certainly know who was in the kitchen. And in none of my great digital experiences do I know who made it and can I thank them. You and I both have had this experience where we see an app or a tech that meant something to us, or a website that meant something to us, and we get to meet the creator.  MATT: It’s so exciting. ANIL: Yes. So I felt that all like a flash the first time I saw the prototype of Glitch. Then we spent a year and a half, almost two years, really remaking the company in that vein. So I joined, which was incredibly intimidating, to be the first non-founder CEO of this company after 17 years and 18 years in business. We had shared an office with Trello and we moved out on our own, which felt like being 18 years old and moving out of mom and dad’s house. We renamed the company Glitch. Joel was incredibly supportive.  And then the team, the people here… It’s so interesting because we’re not trying to be retro. I don’t have any idealistic view of the good old days, but I think there were things on the web that we used to like that we miss. So we imagined a modern version of that and everybody aligned around that. It’s really interesting where there are people certainly of my cohort who are like “Oh I remember the old internet and I used to go to MetaFilter,” or whatever the old thing was, but most of them are like, “Oh I’ve never known that web. The web I’ve grown up on was — the wildest part of it was MySpace and everything else has been this blue box we shove our photos into.” And the exceptions are around the edges. Definitely I had a WordPress theme that I used a hack on, or definitely I had a Tumblr thing that I would try to mess with the theme of. But those were the edges. It is satisfying to make something, and very little of their experience of the web had been that, and so they wanted to unleash that for as many people as they could.  We’ve been fortunate. We came out of beta a little over a year ago. People have built well over three million apps on Glitch, and it’s going up very quickly, which is fun. [laughs] They are all full stack web apps, they are 99.99% open-source, they are all remixable. You can view source on all the apps — and full stack, you can even view the server code. It feels like a bit of the promise of the web that got so many of us excited in the beginning. MATT: So someone could think of it like a largely open-source code repository where all the code executes as well? ANIL: Mhm, yes. MATT: You can see how things work and if you build something, I can click a button, remix it, essentially fork it, software terms, and start my own version? ANIL: Yes, yeah, exactly. So for everybody, if you come to Glitch, I comment it’s almost like an app store. There will be something fun today that’s like “Build a Slack bot” or “Make a fun game for your friend,” or whatever it is — very simple stuff. And if you just want to go, take that and play, you’re great, it’s fine, you don’t have to be a coder, you don’t have to dig in. What we find is most people are like, “This is cool, but I want this button to be blue instead of green,” or “My boss wants me to add this one feature to this little tool,” or whatever it is. Then that idea of, “I’m going to remix this and customize it and make it my own.” The fact that you could do it in the browser, you click remix, you get your own copy, and behind the scenes it’s just a cloning a git repository.  But what’s happening is the editor — it’s like Google Docs. You can do live, real-time editing together on the code, and you can share the link with somebody. As soon as you get in that mode where rather than “I’m going to figure out what this is on my own,” but I can collaborate with somebody — and especially that you can just do it in your browser, you’re not installing a dev environment, you’re not configuring an editor, you’re not doing all the complicated things, you’re just doing the creative part — I think that has been very, very freeing for people.  There is this magic happening behind the scenes where that app runs and then if you type in code and you make a change, it immediately is running with that newer version. Those are things that have empowered people to sit there and say, “Now I’ve got permission to do this again,” maybe in a way that if I’m an older-timer and I’m used to doing it on GeoCities or on MySpace or something back in the day, but that has gotten hard. I think you and I both started FTP-ing pages up to a website. That’s hard as hell to do now. MATT: Oh my goodness. [laughs] ANIL: There’s deploy scripts and there’s cloud configuration and — MATT: It’s gotten more complicated, actually, now. ANIL: Yeah, yeah. MATT: It actually always surprised me, Moveable Type had this feature in WordPress too, where you edit the template in the browser. ANIL: Yeah. MATT: How popular that would be and actually still is today. Like, we still invest in — I guess we build it on CodeMirror or something, which is an open source library. ANIL: Yeah, so do we. And it’s essential. MATT: Oh cool. People love those features. ANIL: If you’re an experienced dev, you are going to have your whole toolkit, and you’re going to connect it all up. It’s the difference between a weekend woodworker or hobbyist, and the person who’s got the wood shop.  MATT: But collaboration is a super feature that none of the desktop tools that I’ve used have. ANIL: Yeah, exactly. I think the biggest thing we saw is that you could — people already have the behavior. If you’re editing a Google Doc or whatever tool you use, you send them a link, or you Slack them a link, and you’re just in there. You don’t even think about it, you know, “What do you think of this,” “You might not —”  MATT: You’re not resolving versions, they’re just happening in real time, which I think is really powerful. ANIL: Yeah. In the olden days when you would email Word doc final_final_REALLYFINAL_versionthree… [laughter] and you’re approving changes, it’s like, “Oh god, this is hell,” right? MATT: Not old days, that’s current lawyer days, by the way. ANIL: Yeah, yeah if it’s expensive, right. Legal contracts, sure. But the internal, for some announcement or something —   MATT: Totally. ANIL: — you’re not doing that. And then code was still feeling like that. I love GitHub, we use it every day, it’s an essential tool, but I — probably every single day — type “man git.” I’ve been using it for as long as its existed. [laughter]  MATT: Yeah. ANIL: I don’t think I’m dumb, I think it’s hard. [laughs] You know? MATT: Yeah, yeah. ANIL: Especially when you have other things to do. If that’s all I did, I think I could probably learn it, but I have to do other things. So that idea of, while you’re just remixing something, it’s already handled, and then while you type and both of you or all ten of are typing in your Glitch project, we’re auto-committing into git behind the scenes.  Then the biggest thing for me, after we launched in beta, that turned the corner for Glitch, was we introduced a feature called Rewind. It’s a timeline slider at the bottom, you can pop it up at the bottom in a window, and it gives you the same thing you see on a YouTube video, but if you want to rewind back to old versions of your app, you just slide the slider back. And again, could I undo a commit and revert and do the right thing? Yeah, I can do it, I’ve done it. I don’t feel confident at doing it, and I certainly don’t do it casually. I wouldn’t just be like,Let me try a different version of this and undo these things.”  MATT: Play around with it. ANIL: Right. And again, I’m a spreadsheet nerd, in spreadsheets we do scenarios all the time. “What if it grows by 1.2% instead of 1.1%?” It’s trivial, right? So you are able to think more broadly. It un-bounds your experimentation, it changes the way that you’re willing to try something because there is a lower cost to it.  Rewind is about that. It’s “Let me try a different version of this app. I’m going to remix my own app with one click,” [and] three seconds later I’ve got another copy. Now I’m going to rewind back to last Thursday and “What if I’d used this other framework, tool kit, API, instead of this one? Now I can have them side by side and look at the difference.” That kind of creation, I have that in Garageband when I’m making music, I have that in turning off a stack of layers in Photoshop, when I’m working visually. I have that in all my other creative tools, and in code it’s way too hard. MATT: The only thing I’ve seen close is maybe the computational worksheets from Wolfram.  ANIL: Yeah. I think they’re great. I look at the Jupiter notebooks, and in Python they get a little bit of that feel. Those are all adjacencies. I don’t think any of this is new. People have been exploring these boundaries for decades in coding culture and in computer science, but productizing it for something you could actually put a live web app on today instead of in the lab — I think that is the leap, that’s the thing we want to do, is take this out of…  We can imagine a million things, but can you do something that — you can use this and then ship a production app you’re using at work, like the actual… The thing we have a lot of — Slack bots for example — people are like, “I just want to get some data out of this whole legacy system and dump it into a Slack channel, and I know the connecting pieces are here.” So Slack, they created a bunch of examples that do the basic mechanics of it. Actually, Matt Haughey, an old mutual friend of ours —  MATT: Oh wow. ANIL: — yeah, had built some of these examples. MATT: And there is an amazing connection as well that the predecessor to Slack was Glitch. ANIL: Mhm, yes.  MATT: In a different incarnation.  ANIL: Yes. Exactly. So the team had originally built Flickr, a lot of the same folks, and that started as Game Neverending, and they pivoted from the game into Flickr, which was a feature of what they were doing. The second incarnation of the game was called Glitch. And we had started…  Actually the first prototype that we had built was called Hyperdev. We went through a lot of iteration but I reached out to Stuart Butterfield and the team at Slack, and I was like, “Listen, you’re not using the Glitch name, we’ve got something good that we think is worthy, not just another generic photo sharing app, we’ve got some idea here,” and they believed us and they thought that was worthwhile, so they were very generous in cutting us a deal to get it. And we got the Glitch handle on Twitter and all that stuff, and that was it. It’s funny because I’m always a little skeptical — names are names — the product, it’s always about the product in these things. But the truth of it is that changing the name was the biggest inflection point we had. As soon as that happened, people could understand what it was in a way. That was really surprising to me. In retrospect, I said, well if you get a Prince fan to run a company, they’re going to rename things, so… that’s just how it goes. [laughter] MATT: I like it. Formerly known as. ANIL: Exactly. MATT: One of the things that was really an undercurrent there was a real optimism about what could be built and everything. You were also an early contrarian, perhaps a pessimist or realist, however you want to define it —   ANIL: Or at least critical, for sure. MATT: — on the neutrality or goodness of technology and communities and things. ANIL:  Yeah. MATT:  Tell me about how — you have the receipts, so what were the receipts there, and what happened like you predicted? ANIL: Like a lot of people who are changed by something, you have a crisis of faith. So I had been working on building blogging tools at the point I left that work, for seven-and-a-half years. I had joined a company that my friends had started that made a product that I loved. And by the time I left, I felt like none of that was true. They weren’t in charge, the company was unrecognizable, the products had fallen into disarray or decay, I wasn’t proud of a lot of the work.  More broadly, I had gotten very disillusioned with tech in general. I had been in San Francisco for, at that point, three years or something, and I would walk my dog around South Park where I lived, and hear three different people talking about their podcasting startups and I — [laughs] I was like I’ve got to get the hell out of here, I’ve got to go home, I’ve got to go back to New York, as I think happens.  There’s not some epiphanic moment where the clouds parted and all the sudden I saw this thing. I always follow my gut and my gut was like, “This is not good for me personally but something is wrong here, something is really wrong.” For context, that you will remember but that I think has been erased because our industry doesn’t have a great history, there had been a lot of effort around just before that — a thing called OpenSocial.  MATT: Sure, yeah. ANIL: So Facebook had had its platform that had succeeded in people building apps for Facebook, which is funny because they killed that off too, but at the time it was the hot thing. Everybody else freaked out and said we’re going to respond to this. So the company I was at, we participated at Six Apart, and also MySpace was big in it and Google. MATT: Evo, Google, everybody. ANIL:  Yeah, exactly. MATT: Everyone except Facebook was a part of this. ANIL: Right, exactly, right, this is a coalition of the willing. They had some big event at Google and all kinds of — I remember at the time thinking “Wow, these folks have a lot of money. And they did some big event and launched it.” I had been very excited because I wrote about it. I was like, “Listen, the open web wins, and this is about the open web and Facebook is closed and it’s like the new AOL and it’s just siloed,” and all these things. The thing that got me excited was I wrote that blog post and it got linked to by a blog I had helped recently set up just before that, which was Marc Andreessen’s blog, and he said, “This is the smartest take of the day.” I was like, “Wow, the Netscape guy thinks I’m smart.” MATT: That’s awesome. ANIL: You fast forward not much later and Marc’s on the board of Facebook and OpenSocial is dead and in fact all of the work I had tried to do on OpenID and pretty much everything except OAuth of that era died. A lot of that was the user experience was bad, the technology was too hard, it wasn’t user-centric enough — there’s a lot of legitimate criticisms. But the motivations behind them were all legitimate, that no one company should own identity, that we should have ways to share identity pseudonymously between sites — there were a lot of really key pieces there that were dead on.  And that we should be able to control our information and where it goes and have a record. One of the important ideas that totally got dropped that was an underpinning of things like OAuth, was that you would have a record of where you signed into and where your data got sent to, and it would be this audit log. And you imagine how different that world would be and one of the —   MATT: TypeKey was the identity provider that had an open —  ANIL: Yeah, yeah that was… And we built a product around —   MATT: It was great because it would show you where you had —   ANIL: Yeah. And it would show you the history and also that we documented the protocol and said you can implement your own, and we never… It was a thoughtful design. I think, again, the user experience was too hard. There were a lot of legitimate reasons it didn’t work but there was a very informed, thoughtful perspective, and one of the last big projects I had pushed on was —   So the company I was at, at the time, we had Moveable Type and Typepad, which were two big, serious publishing platforms. And then we ran LiveJournal, which at the time was still one of the biggest social networks in the world, but it was probably the first to get to 10 million users. MATT: I think also, in addition to pioneering so much, was largely open-code or open source? ANIL: Entirely open source.  MATT: Open source. You created Memcached, a lot of things. ANIL: Created Memcached, yeah, yeah, exactly. MATT: That Mogile and everyone uses today. ANIL: Yeah, exactly. There is this hugely generative platform. They invented a lot of — a functional social model and of the underlying technology and open source, it was really thoughtfully done. But we were adapting to the new world. And so Facebook reached out and said “Will you use this new feature we have, where people can share their activities on” — I think it was still “the Wall” at that point. MATT: Was that Beacon? ANIL: This was Beacon. So we pushed back and I leaned on our lawyer and we said “We’ll do it but it’s opt-in and our users have to be informed.” And it was actually, to my mind, the basics that you do. People don’t share their information without consent. We were the only launch partner of Beacon out of dozens, and the commerce sites and everything, who made it opt-in. And Facebook had pushed back really, really hard.  I was shocked because I had just assume everybody would do this. I thought, “Oh they messed up in their defaults but they… of course they want users to consent to sharing data with them.” I was astoundingly naive. In retrospect, I didn’t even feel stupid. I should have felt stupid, and instead I was just like, “I have misunderstood where I am.” MATT: I wouldn’t put that on you. I would say that there was a general zeitgeist of openness and sharing with good intentions. ANIL: Mhm, and that was the social expectation that we all had of each other. MATT: Yeah, yeah. ANIL: I mean, we were competitors, but we both believed, “Oh this is how you do these things.” MATT: And we support the same standards and things like that. ANIL: Yeah, yeah. MATT: Facebook bootstrapped on exploiting that, whether that’s address book APIs or things like Beacon or whatever, it was that kind of — [they] took advantage of some of that good will in a way that wasn’t ultimately two-way. Although they tried to be two-way as well. Let’s be fair. Their platform, the API, a lot of the stuff they now get in trouble with, was to try to open up Facebook. ANIL: Well, right. I think part of it was the reason they exposed data that people didn’t expect is they collected data people didn’t expect to share. Right? And talking to people who were there early at Facebook, one of the things that is interesting is they weren’t even intentionally exploiting — it had not occurred to them that we had these norms, they weren’t of the community.  We had all come up reading Joel and Software and Zeldman and Shelley Powers’ Burningbird. There were these people who were I think in retrospect we would call it “tech ethicists,” who were thinking about the impacts. And also, I think you and I both were like, “We want to be cool to these people.” You want the nod and you want them to link to your blog and all these things. And that healthy impact of them being skeptics and thoughtful, as well as those of us who were coming in, saying we want to get the nod from them, all led to, in good and bad ways, a set of norms, and they didn’t understand the import of — Zuck was not from that. So it wouldn’t even occur to him to try to conform to the norms of somebody he’d never heard of. Like, who would? You know? And so it was just like, “I’m a stranger in a strange land, I’m just going to do what it takes to grow or… I’m not saying, “Why didn’t you have the same values as us?” because, like I said, we got a lot of things wrong, but that was telling.  To your starting point here about how did I go from the cynicism to the optimism, and the truth is, I still have a lot of both. At that point, I reached a breaking point. I genuinely thought “I will never work in tech again, certainly never work at a startup again, I am done with social media as a business. I have to be here because I need it for my career,” but I got as far away as I could.  I came back here to New York, I started working at a non-profit, doing research, I spent a couple years trying to get a grasp on, honestly, what I felt I had been culpable in, like, “What have I helped cause to happen?” and “Is it good?” And then I also had thoughts about my — I had spent a lot of time when I was younger as an activist and involved in a lot of really morally and ethically-based movements. I didn’t feel like what I was doing contributed to the values that I had come up with, and the people that had opened doors for me and inspired me. So I just looked around and, in particular, I looked at who was in the room when we built these things. And it didn’t look like who was in the room when I had worked in the music industry or when I had worked in media or I’d worked in activism. I thought, there is no way we’re thinking about these things.  I wrote this series of posts on my blog in maybe 2009. I think I had said I was leaving Six Apart, but I hadn’t left yet or something. You know there’s that senioritis moment.  MATT: In between, yeah. ANIL: Yeah. MATT: Oh, senioritis. [laughs] ANIL: Right? I wrote about basically every major tech company and what I thought was wrong. I did one a week all summer long that summer. I genuinely thought I had blown up my career. I got PR people that were like basically, “Who the hell do you think you are?” [laughs] And the end of that was — The Social Network had just come out. MATT: The movie about Facebook? ANIL: Yeah, yeah, exactly, the movie about Facebook. And they had a story tied to that in the New Yorker, and I gave a quote basically saying what I thought. I just said, “If you’re Mark Zuckerberg you don’t know what you don’t know, and of course you think everybody can have one public identity that’s yourself because if you’re him, you’re not going to get vilified for it, you’re not going to get kicked out of your house for it, you’re not going to be violently abused for it.”  All the back channels lit up. People were like, Facebook is not happy that you are quoted in this and that you’re seen as somebody credible. I really thought, “I’m never going to work in tech again.” That was my belief.  You fast forward anyway to 2017. By the time I had, you know, dabbled, even what Gina and I were doing, we very assiduously avoided the conventional startup world. I didn’t go to Sand Hill Road and look for VC funding and all those kinds of things.  But I had a really great conversation with my wife and I was saying “I still want to change this industry for the better, I still want to have impact.” I haven’t given up on the potential but tech is itself one of the major social pillars that influences culture. The other is media and entertainment, broadly, and obviously I deeply care about pop culture and those things. And then the third was policy and governance. I had spent a lot of years when I was doing that nonprofit work, working with the Obama administration, and [I’d] gotten access in policy and government, and I started to see “Okay, there’s some things that government can do here but it’s by design, slow. And also very corruptible or capture-able by interests.” Okay, we know those flaws but we didn’t maybe know the extent of them, but we knew that was there.  Then media and entertainment, I had a little bit of an in, and people knew me. They didn’t know why. They’re like, “I don’t know why this guy writes about Prince all the time but like… [laughs] and he seems to know what he’s talking about, this is weird.” MATT: I think you’re a worldwide Prince expert. ANIL: Yeah, you know, I’m not the most knowledgeable Prince fan in the world but there aren’t ten ahead of me. [laughter] So people were like “OK.” And not just that, but they’re like “OK, he understands how the entertainment industry works and that’s interesting.” I thought about how you triangulate fitting those pieces together into shaping tech to be something better. And the truth is, I had as much access as you could have, and I hadn’t been able to have any affect. I had been there, banging the drum, and to talk to the Chief Technology Officer of the United States, and be like “Here’s an issue about data privacy,” and they’re like, “We’re trying our best.” To see people in his office that spoke up on net neutrality and had their lives destroyed by companies trying to lobby to keep net neutrality from happening. This all happens behind the scenes, but I would see good people who were targeted by the AT&Ts of the world, by the Comcasts of the world, who were like, “Do not let this happen.” And then even in media. At the time, not long after that, I got a column in Wired. So for me as a writer that felt like the pinnacle.  MATT: That’s making it. ANIL: Yeah, exactly. In tech influence, it’s like, this is this opinion column in a magazine that at least has the impact. I would write there and it would just get dismissed and bounced off. They’re like, “Oh that’s nice, you brought your blog into a magazine.” It didn’t land.  What I realized is that even seeing the most credible academics, like I think about dana boyd, who is just brilliant at this, and her research institute, Data & Society, would document all this stuff, and it’s incredibly valuable as the underpinnings but it doesn’t cause the change to happen. So ultimately the theory of change I arrived at was you only change the tech industry by being a founder and by having a hit. There is nothing else you can do. Anybody else will get dismissed.  MATT: That’s true, yeah. ANIL: “You’re not in the game, it doesn’t count, you’re just an outsider, you’re just jealous.” I see VCs say this all day long on Twitter to every valid criticism. It’s like, “You’re just jealous because we’re rich,” basically. They’ll frame it different ways but…  As we’re speaking right now, there is a lot of criticism of WeWork ahead of their IPO, and there’s a lot of fundamentals there that are a little iffy. Now people are turning the corner into “Well, okay, maybe there’s some stuff here that’s not as rigorous as it should be,” but the first wave of defense was all “You’re just jealous, they’re a unicorn, you don’t recognize their vision and da da da.”  I’m like, yeah, there are times I miss a vision of something, but the reality is, this is real estate, this isn’t magic. And software doesn’t make real estate magic, and you have to be able to say something is what it is. Interestingly, there is a willingness to hear it if you are at a certain title — CEO, founder, and if your product is a hit. MATT: And here we are. ANIL: Yeah. MATT: That’s a good full circle. On Glitch I noticed the careers page had some interesting stuff. A series of pledges, including no endless meetings. ANIL: Mhm. MATT: Allyship, best practices, reasonable work hours. ANIL: Oh yeah. MATT: Do you ever worry about being held to these things in the future or is everything on there something that you feel like is…? ANIL: I hope to be. Yeah, the good news is a lot of these date back to Fog Creek, and even to the earliest days, which at this point is 19-20 years ago. MATT: Which are the ones you think are most important for people?  ANIL: Oh that’s a good question. I think the fundament is respect for the people on our team. Joel Spolsky, as our founder and our chair, said from day one, “We treat our people well and we give them a great working environment.” And it is a very deeply held view of his. I agree but that’s the ultimate authority, that’s my boss. And that has been true from day one. MATT: Orient it a little bit. How many people do you have here in the office, how many remote? ANIL: The company overall is 56 people. We just had two people accept, so soon we will be 58. Of those, 30 are remote. So 26 here. MATT: The majority, yeah. ANIL: Yeah. And what’s interesting is that is shifting. This has never happened in the 12 years the company has been doing remote. People are starting to move to New York to be in HQ, to balance it out. And it’s always been the other way, which is the remotes were the one-offs and so people were like — obviously you don’t have to twist people’s arm to be in New York, but it was an interesting sense of people — the balance of both.  The majority are remote. There’s an interesting mix of people that have been in the commute-to-work-everyday thing and don’t want to do that anymore. I really love that here in New York, we all take mass transit, but nobody at the company has to drive to work and be stuck in a commute. Nobody around the world does that, so that’s really powerful.  Then importantly, you know, we make sure we pay attention to — there are people in leadership that are remote. There are people in every role and every team, in marketing, in engineering, in infrastructure, [for] everything we do, there are remote team members, in media, all the things that we do, there’s no one side or the other. MATT: I’m excited to hear your thoughts and learn a little bit more about how you operate in a distributed fashion at Glitch. ANIL: Joel Spolsky, who is our founding CEO and co-founder of the company, he had a lot of things to say about how you should set up your tools, your software and [how] everybody should have a really nice, big monitor, and all this stuff.  Then he had this one principle which he still is very adamant about, and in fact he mentioned it in the board meeting we had last week, which is that every coder should have a private office with a door that closes. He really feels it makes a huge difference [in] productivity, and that there is a lot of research and evidence that shows having the space is very valuable, which I’m a full believer in.  I had never — before I worked at Fog Creek and now Glitch — had seen a workplace where that was true. I saw that they were able to have these results for a long time, and then when they built Trello they really started to grow the company and they ran out of offices. So they were sort of like, one, we can’t just expanding forever here but, two also, there’s lots of talent, or people that didn’t want to move to New York City. Those two things led to the obvious, in retrospect, conclusion of the company should be open to remote contributors. It’s interesting because the impulse there was in order to keep doing the structural things they were doing. So remote workers at the company are required to have a private office at home, a room with a door that closes, and that is not your kid’s nursery or where your greenhouse is that you’re growing your plants. It’s its own space.  In exchange, the company, we provide a sit/stand desk, if you want a motorized one, a really nice chair, we’ll pay for the internet connection, we make sure you get broadband, all that stuff is taken care of. But it’s very much this sense of — to create the same atmosphere as what we have in the office. Then there’s a whole set of processes around how everything works to make sure it’s uniform, whether you’re in HQ or not, for coders. And that was something that was probably the biggest culture shock when I joined.  MATT: Having an office with a door is good for developers, why not for everyone? ANIL: That was the first question I had, as somebody who is not a developer, right? [laughs] Can I get one of those? I can write a couple lines of code, like, what do we gotta do? And actually what we came to really talk about — and this was really catalyzed in particular — because we had shared an office with Trello as one of the other spin-out companies, and they were growing leaps and bounds around and after their acquisition by Atlassian. We were growing our team, and it was really crowded, we had this shared office in downtown Manhattan. People were getting doubled up in offices, and there was a question, “Why are these people over here and these people were there?” What I came to understand as we built out a new office here is there’s different work modes. I’m someone that definitely falls into this where I have one way of working when I’m writing, which I try to do a lot, one way of working when I’m coding, for sure, and then of course you end up in a meeting, you’ve got to be in a conference room and sit down with people. There’s all these different ways of working.  I found one of the things that I find for a lot of people really consistently is they’ll say I’m most productive on email when I’m on a plane and there’s no WiFi, or I do a lot of writing at a coffee shop, even though I’m not talking to anybody else that’s there, I like that energy. MATT: Totally, I can totally relate to that. ANIL: Yeah I have that experience with libraries. Yeah, right? So there were different work modes and that was what really was the epiphany — even though we’re very effective with giving coders private offices, at the time the company was just that. There were really only coders. As recently as in the past decade, Fog Creek was a company where there was nobody who had a title of marketing, there was nobody with the title of sales, there was nobody… [laughs]  MATT: Wow. ANIL: I mean there’s entire business functions that did not exist. It was a very, very extreme environment. And good in a lot of ways — obviously it had a lot of success — and then bad in a lot of ways. So you couldn’t do normal things like having a couple of people get together to talk about messaging or design because those functions didn’t exist and you didn’t have any place to do them if everybody is warrened off in their own little room. Finding the balance of how do you have different ways of working was really powerful. In HQ, it translates into conference rooms. We have a space that I literally set up to be like a coffee shop, and we’re doing that with our new headquarters that we’re building — it’s going to feel like a coffee shop. You have the nice couch and you get some caffeine whenever you want. MATT: Cool. ANIL: So that’s there. But the biggest thing was the very first day I joined we had a meeting, an all-hands. We still have them every week, and everybody, even in headquarters, even at desks, if they didn’t have a private office, put on their headset and joined the video conference from their desk independently.  I had had this in many other companies that I had worked for or worked with. It wasn’t the scenario where if I was remote, everybody in HQ was all around one table, in one room together, and then I was on the other end on some weird conference phone, like one of those Polycom phones, and they forgot I was there and they couldn’t see me. Or the weird creepy thing [where] your video shows up when you talk so every time you talk you know you’re on some giant 10-foot screen with everybody staring at all the pores on your face. These were the only two modes of interacting that I had ever had. [laughs] MATT: Right. ANIL: Instead, everybody had the exact same set up, the same camera, the same kind of headset and could see each other, and it didn’t matter if you were in HQ or if you were thousands of miles away, you had the same experience at that meeting. And everything changed.  MATT: It sounds like y’all — it must be a delight to work there. I’m sure some listeners are like “Oh, I need to check out their careers page.” ANIL: As I said, we have a weird background. The company overall is — in two months, we’re going to be 20 years old. But we really started reinventing the company about three years ago. Some of the things that we changed: one, the top level, one of the very first things I did was around recruiting and hiring.  Very early on, Joel Spolsky, our co-founder and CEO, had said, “A good tool, if you want to assess people’s skills as coders is to use a white board and talk to them about their thinking about code during the interview process.” This is something, as I’m sure you’re aware, that became almost a cargo cult thing. Right? People would do this, what to me felt like a hazing ritual, of demonstrate your memorization of some algorithm by writing it on a white board from scratch, which is not how anybody in the world ever codes, especially not when we’re the company that had co-created Stack Overflow! [laughs]  MATT: It’s all about Googling things, yes. ANIL: Of all the places. Right, yeah, of all the places you should be able to just copy and paste from Stack Overflow, it should be here. So his impulse had been right, which is like, let’s see how people think, and don’t put them through all the pressure of having to set up a dev environment just for an interview. But I think in the absence of the steady hand saying, “Here’s the principle behind it,” it became, as I said, almost a hazing ritual. I felt very personal about that because one, I care a lot about inclusion in the industry and anything that’s a barrier is really dangerous. And then for me personally, I had worked as a coder for years and yet I knew I couldn’t pass that test. So what did it say about the utility of that test? Clearly it was testing something else, you know, to be standing at that white board and be put on the spot that way. So we changed that. But it was the beginning of a change in the culture overall, which was interrogating which assumptions were about us being different for a real reason and which things were rituals that we had held onto from the olden days. Things changed pretty quickly after that.  For example, we had always had a pretty public set of rules around how the company ran, but we formally turned that into a public handbook that people could look at for our HR policies. And that both helped us refine and sharpen what we shared but also, again, helped in recruiting, because people outside could be like “Wow, I know how that company runs and how processes are going to work for me and whether I’ll be taken care of.” We did that around compensation. Joel and Michael Pryor, his co-founder, had set up an engineering compensation ladder, gosh, probably a dozen years ago. A long time ago, but it hadn’t been kept up to date, and it hadn’t been modernized, and it was only for engineering. We turned that into a full salary transparency document within the company where we had documented what compensation and pay would be for every role, including non-engineering roles, which we introduced and actually defined. [laughs] That was, again, it’s far from perfect, there is a lot of work to do to improve it, but it built so much more trust where people, especially underrepresented people in the industry, could be like “At least I’m being paid fairly compared to the person next to me. There’s always improvements to make in compensation but I’m not being targeted because of who I am, to be exploited, to be paid less.” So there was a lot of this stuff where we took the building blocks that were there and then modernized them or updated them. That took a year, a year-and-a-half of work, but it really, really paid off in terms of one, attracting a new wave of incredible talent that were every bit the peer of anybody who’d ever worked here — which is extraordinary — and then we grew this company and this product while hiring at a fast clip, while expanding to a new headquarters, while doing all this other stuff simultaneously.  It’s very hard to walk and chew gum at a startup at the same time, and I think we were only able to do it because we had built that level of trust around the process, and especially around treating people in that basic way that they expected in the workplace. And some of that is about being remote friendly, some of that is about being friendly to people who are underrepresented in the industry, some of that is just about building fair processes for how everything works day to day. MATT: Why not go fully distributed? Why do you still keep the New York office and why and how is it still important to you? ANIL: We talked about it. That was a consideration actually before I had joined. There are a couple reasons that I had decided to keep it.  The first is I am, at the personal level, a very unapologetic New York City partisan. I’ve been somebody who cares deeply about the tech community in New York for almost two decades now, and I felt like the company is a symbol to the city of our tech culture and community. So there was a sense of which of the old guard, classic New York City internet startups were still relevant and pertinent and here, unapologetically here.  The other part was that, at a real pragmatic level, we were able to attract talent in certain ways because we’ve got options. There are people that one, like to work around other people. There are people that like to have camaraderie and they like to have a connection to the people around them. Certainly we see that especially in some of the other roles we had brought in, where we have a team doing media and we have a team doing community and all these other things, and they like to be able to commiserate and share ideas. So that was really powerful, and we unlocked that.  Also, there were people that want to live in New York City. [laughs] So we were just able to attract talent of people that were like, “I get to work at a cool tech company and be in New York? Sold.” The wild thing about that is that it’s cheaper than living in San Francisco! MATT: In-person is so powerful so how do you keep those ties, being so much stronger and that communication being better? ANIL: It’s something I’m very mindful of, and we are really disciplined in a couple ways. One of the things is no hallway conversations about work. And actually, one of the telling things is that we as a company have always done lunch together every day in HQ. So everyone in New York, really, meetings stop, calls stop, whatever is going on, everybody sits down, actually company-wide because it tends to happen in other locations as well, but really in HQ we provide lunch every day and everybody sits down and has lunch together.  Understandably remote folks worry about — that first day they’re like, “Wait, everybody there is going to be talking about stuff and I’m not going to know about it.” And the great thing is, saying “We’re not going to talk about work, we’re not going to make decisions about work in that lunch,” makes it a social place. It’s actually much more low key.  MATT: Do they really not talk about work? That’s so hard to believe. ANIL: Yes, well because — it’s not that hard because there is so much stuff that’s interesting, well, one being in New York and two, at a social level. People like to put it away. We have really good boundaries. And also, they feel a real out-loud sense of “I’m not going to have this conversation without her here, without him here, without that person who is in charge of that.” Because we have leads, we have people who are leaders in the company that are remote, so it’s not — you couldn’t have a full conversation. Half the company is not there. So you couldn’t have the conversation without them.  So that’s really powerful, and then we already have a habit of taking notes at every meeting. If three people are having a meeting and they’re all here in New York, we’ll sit in a conference room. There’s not some weird ritual thing where we will refuse to sit together. But even there, there will still be the notes that are shared, just like they are for any other meeting. So I think those habits, because the habits are deeply ingrained, and at this point for 10 years, there just isn’t that impulse. And it has been very clarifying to us about, one, just real life and what affects people, but also it helps with not being insular to just — to think about what’s happening out in the world to people. I think it can be really powerful. That, for example, led directly to a policy we had created around paid climate leave. And originally the catalyst came from a worker of ours who is in Florida and was being displaced by a hurricane, and then we simultaneously had somebody that was being potentially displaced by a wildfire at the same time in California. So we made a policy to accommodate them. So it’s paid leave if you’re displaced by extreme weather.  But that core combination was one also informed by — we had had our headquarters displaced by Hurricane Sandy here in New York, when that hit. But that sense of just, we have people in different places, and we build policies that work for all of them. And that rigor, that perspective, I think it makes us run better, it makes us much more disciplined, it makes us have to be intentional about communication.  Those things are superpowers. They make our work better, faster, more efficient, more reliable, more trustworthy, because we have that discipline. And we honestly, I think we would be lazy if we were not distributed, if we were not rigorous around how we communicate, and in ways that would hurt our long-term opportunity.  MATT: Well and I think it’s one of the reasons that listeners will find the example of Glitch so fascinating, because you do put a lot of thought into all of your policies. One of the ones that I’m a little curious about, especially given you have a hybrid structure, is how you approach onboarding. Do people fly to New York and do some of that in person? How does it work? ANIL: We do onboarding here in New York. The most extreme was actually back in the spring when we were really scaling up, we had nine engineers join in a week. Interestingly, we have a number of leads, whether they are director level or higher in the company, who are educators.  Onboarding, in its fullness of the plan, onboarding is something that we spend months on, so it’s three or four months. But the core of it is about those first two weeks, that’s the experience that we really design most deeply. And the first week is school. People come in, and the first day is like, “Get your laptop, get plugged in, get connected to Slack.”  We time it so that people join during the monthly all-hands. That’s when, in addition to an overview of how the business is doing, we share financials with the whole team, but also we do our bravos. That’s acknowledgement of people, thanking each other for the work they’ve done, when they’ve gone above and beyond on certain work.  They get to see — a new employee on their first day — how we share gratitude to one another within the company, and they get to see a meeting where everybody is dialed in, in the same way, whether they’re remote or not. And they get to see us model the behaviors of what we are in the first day, and then they spend some time getting two-factor all set up and all that other annoying stuff. [laughs]  Typically the rest of that core onboarding process — and this varies by team — we do a big overview of how the business runs, what the mission is, what the history of the company is, what our goals are, what the road map is. I spend a lot of time talking about the values and the vision of the company, and that’s typically in one-on-one sessions with people who have joined so they can have room to ask questions, or sometimes with their lead. That’s the better part of a day, usually right towards the beginning of the week when they have joined. We have a much more social get-to-know in small groups, people across different teams. Typically we’ll have a dinner with some folks so they can say hi to other people in a little more social way. We will always bring in a person to HQ for onboarding and bring in their lead if their lead is remote. So people do get face time. We do think that has value. There is a way to deploy that as a tool, and especially for social interaction, when people are getting to know each other and have to build a relationship, so we’ll do that for a full week with the person and their lead in for a week.  The two biggest anxieties when people join a company are basically, “Am I going to know where I fit into any of this?” And then variations on what I think of as the problem we all had in junior high of “Which lunch table am I going to sit at?” [laughs] MATT: Oh totally. ANIL: We are very intentional about that, because we all eat lunch together every day, we’re like, “This is where you’re going to be, and everybody is going to sit with you, and you don’t get picked for a lunch table, everybody sits together.” And that stuff is — nobody wants to talk about it, but even if we’re adults, even if we’re decades removed from those points, that’s still that lizard brain in the back of your mind — that is always there. And so we do a lot to accommodate that.  Especially because the majority of our team, including management, are women or non-binary folks, and that is very rare in tech. And that’s true whether you look at race or LGBTQ representation, we over-index in a lot of ways there compared to the rest of the tech industry. So I try to be much more mindful of — there is a higher percentage of our team who will not have been in that scenario where somebody accommodated them and somebody asked “What do you want here?” or “What do you need?” Just that little bit of accommodation or thought I think has been extraordinary for people where they feel overjoyed at “Oh, I wasn’t crazy in my last job when I thought it was wild that they didn’t even tell me who I report to or where I sit.” [laughs] “And that this place will tell me ‘You’re going to sit here and this is the work you’re going to do and this is why it matters.’” That’s all it takes for people to feel like they were welcomed. MATT: We have talked a bit about benefits and I know equity is really important to you. So if I’m not in New York, how do you think about — I don’t get free lunch every day. Or if I am in New York, do I get a free internet connection? ANIL: [laughs] No. So that’s where we go to. It’s not going to be exactly the same. We want things to be fair but they don’t have to be identical. There are things that are going to be better or worse, stronger or weaker in HQ versus remote. We try to, again, to document them and to be clear, and I think those are really good examples. And it’s hard, right? We do cover internet access for people who work from home and we don’t cover it here. And we’re iterating on this stuff constantly. But one of the big things we do is we just talk about it, we are able to raise it, we have people — leads are encouraged to ask their team about it. People want expectations to be clear and they want to know that things are fair, but they don’t demand that they be exactly identical.  MATT: Anil, thank you so, so much. This has been Anil Dash from Glitch on the Distributed Podcast with Matt Mullenweg. We’ll see y’all next time.  MATT: That was Anil Dash. You can find him on Twitter at @anildash. That’s A-N-I-L Dash. It’s good to know that people like Anil Dash are out there running companies and redefining what the tech industry can look like from the inside.  On the next episode of the Distributed podcast, I’ll be joined by my colleague Mark Armstrong once again. We’ll talk about the things we’ve learned over the last year, discuss some of our favorite takeaways from the podcast, and take a glimpse at what awaits us in 2020. I’ve learned a lot about how other companies are doing distributed work, and I’m excited to collect my thoughts and maybe make a few predictions about where we’re headed. Thank you for listening, and see you next time. 

Read more about the Grand Meetup in “The Importance of IRL in a World of Screens.” Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. On this episode of the Distributed podcast, we get an insider’s look at the Grand Meetup, Automattic’s annual weeklong all-staff event, where employees have an opportunity to collaborate, learn from one another, and hang out face-to-face. Folks from across the company share what makes this gathering so special, talk about social cohesion in the context of a large distributed company, and reflect on what’s great (and what’s tough) about the distributed lifestyle. The full episode transcript is below. *** Mark Armstrong: Okay go. Josepha: The song that’s in my head right now is “Good morning. Good morning.” My name is Josepha Haden Chomphosy. I shouldn’t say it like a question. That is my name. My name is Josepha. Mark: Great to see you. Thank you for stopping by the Automattic podcast booth. Josepha what do you do with Automattic? Josepha: Great question. A little bit of everything. I am the lead of the .Organization Division, which is the division that supports and helps to guide a lot of our open-source work with the WordPress project itself. /// Mark: Who are you? Tell me your name. Aaron Douglas: My name is Aaron Douglas. I am a Mobile Wrangler for Automattic. My official job title is actually Chief Tater Tot Officer — I neglected to change that and it just stuck. I work on the WooCommerce mobile app as my primary thing, but everywhere around Automattic I try to help out where I can. /// Mark: OK. Here we are in the hallway again. What’s your name and what do you do at Automattic? Brandon Kraft: Hi, I’m Brandon Kraft. I’m a Code Wrangler working with our Jetpack plugin. /// Mark: What is your name? Sheri: Sheri Bigelow. Mark: And what do you do at Automattic? Sheri: I am an Excellence Wrangler. /// Rocío Valdivia: My name is Rocío Valdivia. I am from Spain and I’m a Community Wrangler at Automattic. /// Achaessa James: I’m Achaessa and I’m with the Legal team. /// Will Brubaker: So my name is Will Brubaker. I am the Chief Mechanical Officer. /// Erin Casali: So hello, I’m Erin Casali, often referred as “Folletto,” and I currently work as the Design Lead of Jetpack. And how long? It’s been a while now, six years. Mark: Where are we now, here? Erin: So we are — I think — in Orlando, because we are inside a hotel, and have been a while, so I’m not entirely sure where we are? Your hotels look all the same. But we’re in Orlando. I lost count of time. I think we are on day three or four of the Grand Meetup. Mark: It really is a blur, isn’t it? Erin: It is. Mark: Thank you for being here. Matt Mullenweg: Howdy howdy, I’m Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic, and the host of the Distributed podcast. Those voices you just heard? Those were Automatticians — folks who work for Automattic — and today we’re going to be hearing from them about this year’s Grand Meetup, and more broadly, what distributed work means to them. Back in September, Automattic held its annual Grand Meetup, which is the one time during the entire year that pretty much everyone at Automattic gets together in one place. The other 51 weeks of the year, we all work from different places all over the world — over 70 countries now. So this is a chance for some of us to meet face-to-face for the first time, and for everyone to catch up with old friends, discuss our work and align around our goals, and hear great talks from folks like Stephen Wolfram (who was a guest on this podcast a few weeks back). We set up a recording booth at the meetup and talked to a bunch of folks from around the company to hear about their experiences with distributed work. My colleagues Mark Armstrong and Ben Huberman were on the ground, asking questions throughout the meetup. Mark and Ben are from Automattic’s Editorial team, and they’ve also been helping out a ton with this podcast. We’ll kick things off with some Automatticians talking about why meetups matter for distributed teams, then get into an interview with Megan Marcel, our Director of Global Events & Sponsorships, about what it takes to pull off this huge event with so many people — I think we had around 900 this time. Then we’ll hear some remote work tips, and finish with some stories about why these folks have chosen the distributed lifestyle. OK, let’s do it. Take it away, Mark. Mark: OK, thank you, Matt. Now that we’ve met some of our colleagues from Automattic, let’s go deeper and learn a little bit more about their experiences at the Grand Meetup. If I can set the scene a little bit, Ben and I stationed ourselves at different tables outside in the hallways of this conference room in Orlando — just a few miles from Walt Disney World. We just flagged down people as we saw them, or people would see us with a microphone and say, “Hey, what’s that? Can I get interviewed?” I have to say it was super fun to have an excuse to pull people aside and interview them and ask them about their experience at the Grand Meetup. It can be such a nerve-wracking experience to be surrounded by all the people you work with, so it’s just fun to take a step back and look at the scene, and ask some questions of each other on what it’s all about and why we’re even there in the first place.  Mark: Now we’re here at the Grand Meetup in Orlando, Florida. What is the Grand Meetup? Josepha: The Grand Meetup is basically like a company all-hands. I think that’s how corporate places call it, where we get everybody from the company who’s able and willing together in one place to do some additional training, additional team-building, and a lot of [the things that have] to happen when you work in a distributed company. So when you work in a distributed company, every time that you interact with your colleagues via text, or however you are away from them, you are taking out of your social bank account with them. And so when you get people together, that’s when you have the opportunity to see each other face to face, remind everybody that you’re all human beings, and fill that social capital back up, because it’s so hard to communicate via text. That’s one of the main benefits of bringing everybody together this way. Of course we have a lot of trainings and a lot of opportunities to have high-bandwidth conversations. But I think that’s one of the main benefits, and it’s almost a side-effect benefit. I don’t think anyone thinks actively about that when they bring everybody together for this. /// Mark: When did you join Automattic? Achaessa: November 1 in 2018, so I give a flash talk this year. It’s my first GM. Mark: Fantastic. So what how has it been so far?  Achaessa: The GM? I love it. I love it. I’m meeting all these people who I’ve been working with all this time and it’s so awesome. It’s like the best in the world. /// Will: It’s a very energizing experience to be here. My job is very demanding, and my life is very demanding, and everything around us is very demanding. I start to get de-energized in about July or August, and it’s also like things are physically — it’s hot outside, and things are more difficult in this time of year, at least for me. But then I get here, and I get around people and I ask questions there that are on my mind and what I’m passionate about, and I want a real answer here. And you know what? I get a real answer, and I get an answer that inspires me and makes me want to go home and work harder. You know what? I’m empowered now to fix the things that have exhausted me, and we’re going to start over, and we’re going to move towards the next year’s goals, and I’m very clear what those are. And that’s what this does for me, is that it’s a reset. It energizes. /// Ben: So right now we are in Orlando for the annual Grand Meetup. What does the Grand Meetup mean to you? Rocío Valdivia: Wow. The Grand Meetup means a lot of things to me. I love the energy. I come back home with all my batteries charged for the rest of the year. I’m very aligned with the values of this company and I’m very aligned with the kind of people that I find here in general. Nobody’s normal, right, and everybody’s different in so many different ways. And in this company you can be however you want to be, and [be] nice to each other. And something that I will highlight as well is that everybody helps each other. I love that. And what I value the most about the GM is the connections that I create in person, that I can use them. It’s like I take advantage of all the connections I create in person during the GM the rest of the year. I learn more what people do. For example, I sit down and I meet someone during lunch and hey, this person just tells me that [they] work in marketing or [they’re] working on this and that. And then we have a conversation and we realized that we have so many things in common. And then for example, I am marketing seeking help maybe with WordCamps, and then we start planning. “Oh we should do this. We should do that.” And I love it. Because normally those kinds of things don’t happen during the year because you are so focused on your daily-basis job that you can not find the time to just hang out in different teams’ channels. I don’t normally do it because [I am] so busy. Right? /// Mark: What was your first Grand Meetup like? Josepha: Oh, my first Grand Meetup was terrifying. I’m a wild extrovert, especially compared to a distributed technology company standard-issue employee. Wild extrovert. Mark: What are you talking about? Josepha: “I’ve never heard of such a thing!” I was told by my team lead at the time that I didn’t need to prepare for anything because I was so extroverted. And so I arrived and I had no idea what to expect or who was there. I joined a tiny team — like seven people, maybe six even — and so I joined and I knew them and that was it. I didn’t know that there was this whole other company going on. I didn’t know that we had classes we had to attend. I just showed up to stuff randomly on the day that they were happening and it was really stressful. Even for me, I remember thinking at the end of it like, “I’m not sure that I’m an excellent fit here.” I wasn’t prepared. Everybody knows everyone. I don’t know anyone. I have nothing in common because of course I hadn’t spent any time trying to figure out where I was headed. It was really stressful. But I made it through. Mark: It’s a sensory overload, isn’t it? Josepha: Yeah. It’s like the first time you go to CES, in case anyone does. You can make it about two-and-a-half days before you’re like, “This is terrible and I’m going to hide in my room until everyone is gone. And then I’m going to get on the first very slow transportation out of here, and that’s it.” Mark: But it’s like CES, but they are everyone you work with, and a bunch of people who you have already chatted with, but you have never met them in person. Josepha: Exactly. Exactly. And you’re not sure whether you inadvertently offended them. And sometimes you completely forgot to respond to them cause you hadn’t figured out how to use all the communication channels yet. And they’re like, “I asked you something two months ago, it probably shouldn’t have been time sensitive, but now I’m mad and it is.” So you run into all these surprises because you hadn’t figured out how to communicate. You hadn’t figured out how to work with all of the information that comes in because there’s so much information all the time and you have to be proactive about finding it, which is good, in a way, and also really difficult in ways as well. Mark: We’re in a big hotel complex in Orlando, Florida right now. We’ve got a bunch of employees in front of us. How does this compare to your first Grand Meetup? Josepha: It was so much more casual, because, if you think about the difference between 300 employees to almost a thousand employees, and the types of employees, and the roles that they have — that we’ve taken on since then — it was so much more casual. It was almost familial before. And I don’t know if it’s mostly a matter of the way that my work has changed, but I remember that I was in full discovery mode the whole event and just trying to figure out who did what and why, and where all the work came from, and what we were doing, and why we did it. And now it feels like — and I don’t know if it’s accurate or not — but it feels like for the most part, everybody already knows where they’re supposed to be, what they’re supposed to be doing, how the work is supposed to go. We show up and everybody already has this excellent plan and a goal for what to do for the week, even if that goal is “finish my support rotation.” And I think that’s a really nice thing, to have a really easy, collegial sense, which before was a “Hey, casually figuring out what to do now that we’ve arrived.”  Mark: Now there’s another element to Grand Meetups that continues to this day, although it’s evolved a bit. Your first Grand Meetup, correct me if I’m wrong, you did not know that you were going to have to present a flash talk? Josepha: Yeah, I didn’t quite know. I had never seen a flash talk. I didn’t even do any research. So I arrived and someone had told me, “This is a thing that has to happen but it’s really easy, because you’re an extrovert, and so you show up and you talk for four minutes, it’ll be easy.” Now I love public speaking and I’ve done a lot of it, and four-minute presentations for me are way harder than 45 minutes, because you have to choose and plan what you’re going to say, every second of all of that. You don’t have any room for extemporaneous chatter. And so I showed up and they were like, “Oh we never received your slides.” And I was like, “What slides? Why do I need slides? What is it? What is the flash talk?” It’s short. I thought I just had to get up and say my name. And so I had to suddenly pull together slides and it was the most boring, bland title for a talk I could have ever imagined. It was like “Learning to be a better mentor,” which is super on-brand for me. And also, especially seeing what I do now, super on-brand for the future of my work here. But I didn’t know that at the time. No one else knew it at the time. I was just someone here to manage meetups. Man, I felt so stupid because everyone else is “Making paella the best: why Spaniards hate your stupid ham.” And mine was like, “Be a better mentor.” I was so serious. I showed up and I was serious and it was mildly embarrassing, but I survived. Mark: I have to say, I think I remember watching your flash talk and saying, “Yes, Josepha is here.” I really enjoyed it. I remember enjoying it. Kudos to you. Josepha: Thank you. Mark: But it is a funny thing because you come in and you think the flash talks are going to be half about work or maybe some lighthearted stuff. But very rarely they’re about your day-to-day work. I have learned we have such a talented group of people at this company and that’s what I feel like I learned so much from these flash talks. People have such diverse interests and hobbies and passions. Josepha: It brings back that human element, and humanizing people again and reminding people that we’re more than just a Happiness Engineer or someone on Editorial. There’s more to who we are than just that one thing. And I think that’s really special and really important and something you don’t get in corporate settings that are this size. Mark: What are some other pro tips for attending a Grand Meetup?  Josepha: I think the thing that is most important is to consider what your boundaries are before you come. It’s so easy for introverts and extroverts to get swept up in the excitement of it, and like — are you willing to stay up until two in the morning in the party suite? Because that’s where the people that you had dinner with ended up. Because if you don’t, you don’t prepare for it. If you normally go to bed at at 10 o’clock at night and wake up at 6:00 AM and have a really clear routine, and then you get so far off your routine because you’re so excited and you want to connect with people and learn more about them, you can really forget to prepare yourself for that and just wear yourself out long before the event is over. Because especially now, we have these really — this year we have these big Team Days for the first day-and-a-half, and then a bunch of individual trainings all the way through, and ways that people can learn and do high-level planning and teamwork throughout the week. You want to be remotely fresh all the way through that. And if you just don’t remember that you plan to be an extrovert this week and so your introverted self forgot to have lunch by yourself in your room, you’ll feel really overwhelmed by the end of it. And so just planning for that, knowing what you’re wanting to do and how it’s going to change your routine, and being mindful of that for yourself is the biggest thing I think anyone can do before they come. /// Mark: What’s been your favorite part of the Grand Meetup so far? Brandon: That’s a hard question. There’s so many great parts of the Grand Meetup. In some sense we have some amazing keynote speakers. And hearing these folks that we would never meet in person otherwise, and having some really great insight there. But frankly, really it’s just this time here, like right down the hallway between sessions, being grabbed by you, Mark, just to talk for a few minutes. I really like that ability to meet with different people like that, that we wouldn’t normally ping each other on Slack because we don’t really have an operational reason to. But we know each other and we see each other and we rekindle that relationship, even though we don’t work together day-to-day. And if we never had the Grand Meetup, we wouldn’t be able to keep that going. I think the best part is just seeing people that I know from other parts of the company. And even if it’s just a quick hello, or a handshake, or a cup of coffee, or five minutes on a podcast. I really think that’s the most valuable part of the Grand Meetup. /// Mark: Now what are you doing this year? Are you doing a project? Erin Casali: The last few years I’ve helped with organizing the classes. This year I just taught a couple of classes — well, more workshops. I prefer the full workshop format myself. And this year I was helping out with one on floor storming, which is a workshop technique to synchronize and discuss processes. We worked on one on fast design — how to generate ideas quickly, how to push ourselves to create wild ones that then can become useful to projects. Mark: What else happens at a Grand Meetup? Erin: A lot of things. This year is probably one of the most varied ones. So you have a combination of assigned tables, which is something that at the beginning you’re like, “Why are you assigning the table to me?” But then if you feel relaxed because you’re like, “Yeah, I know I need to go to the table, and I know it’s going to be all new people.” And so you chat, you know new people. And then there are keynotes, external speakers, and then there are projects. And then there are a lot of occasions to catch up with people and coordinate things. One of the most beautiful things is how some of the — in the free time between activities — how naturally some discussions pop up. For example, today I’m just out of a discussion that was organized one hour earlier. And because some teams felt the need to discuss some critical topics, some problems they found. And they pulled in the right people, and in an hour we were able to identify some problems, identify some steps forward. It’s still a challenge, but now everyone is synchronized. And it happened just because someone was like, “Yeah, let’s pull the right people in the room together.” Mark: When you have something like that happen, do you sometimes ask yourself, “Why do we not get together more often?” Erin: Frankly, I think there is a balance there. There are times when you’re like, “Oh, I really need to pull people together.” But remotely, you still can. Sometimes it’s just a matter of spinning up a remote chat and sometimes it’s also faster remotely because everyone’s just typing away. You send that private message and that’s very simple in a way. For me that’s one of the powerful — that is a bit understated when we talk about remote work because in practice, very few discussions actually require people to be there in person. What you need is people to synchronize, and there are many ways to synchronize. In this case, I think this could have happened digitally. But it’s just effective because we are here. /// Mark: How does it feel to you seeing the evolution of the company and the evolution of the Grand Meetup, for you to be in this giant hallway and surrounded by a thousand of your closest colleagues? Sheri: It’s so many people. That’s really funny because I came into this meetup like, “Oh, Grand Meetups are not the same. It won’t be the same feeling anymore. This one, it’s too big now. It’s like I don’t know anyone anymore.” I’ll just be walking around and I won’t know anyone. I won’t see anyone that I know and how will that feel? And I thought “Oh, maybe it won’t be as good.” But when I got here, I found that I just see someone, I can’t move through the hall without stopping like 20 times. So it takes me really long to move from one place to the other because I recognize someone, I see someone I worked with, I see someone I’ve only met online ever before and I want to say hi to everyone. And so yet again I’m here saying “I love everyone,” but I haven’t met — I don’t think I could possibly meet them all, actually. There is some really nice balance for me in the sense that I can have some great deep conversations and see my teammates. There was time set up for teams in the beginning, which I greatly valued and that whole “this is massive” feeling, like, “Oh my gosh, look at this room that we filled with people who are my people. They’re just like me.” And that’s one of the things that I thought when I — the very first WordCamp San Francisco that I went to, I was like, “These people are just like me. These are my people.” I feel a strong connection and [hold] a special place in my heart for everyone before I even meet them because I know that if you work here you’re probably pretty great. /// Mark: Had you met any Automattic employee in person before the Grand Meetup? Achaessa: In person before the Meetup? Yeah, a few. Mark: So just to clarify, before you joined the company — the interview process, none of that was in-person, right? Achaessa: No, none of it was in-person. None of it all. But I’ll tell you the reason that I even applied. So I saw this job posted — the corporate paralegal position posted. And I was like, who is this? What’s this company? And so I went and I did my homework and when I got to the HR page, there was the link to the Diversity and Inclusion videos. I went there and I started watching those videos and tears just started shooting out of my face. And I was like, these are my people. I don’t know, it’s just — every single one of them spoke to my heart. In 2016 I got laid off from a consulting job and I had to take an in-house job that required me to be in an office in San Francisco. And I will just tell you that I feel closer to the Automatticians than I felt to those people sitting next to me in that office. Because in an office, sometimes you form cliques and so — I’m 60. You can see my hair, you know, and these were all very young people and they were — they partied a lot. They were still in that age. I’ve been through that age, but I’m not there anymore. And so it was very hard for me to integrate myself in that community. But at Automattic we have interest groups, I guess you would call [them]. We have Slack channels for every level of interest, and I have never felt more included in my life. I have people coming up to me at the gym: “I know you from this channel,” “Oh yeah, I love what you said here,” “Are you going to do this?” And “Let’s do this!” It’s like coming to family, you know, it’s like a family reunion. Mark: Tell me about your flash talk. Achaessa: Ooh. Okay. Mark: What is a flash talk? Achaessa: So a flash talk every first year. Now I hear I lucked out because it used to be every single person, every single year had to do a flash talk until what year? Mark: I would say that would have been 2016 or 2017… Achaessa: I just lucked out. So now it’s every person at their first GM has to give a “Four minutes about me.” So whatever — not necessarily about you, but whatever you want to talk about, you’ve got, maximum, four minutes to do it. And I really freaked out at the beginning, which is funny because in my industry, equity comp, I do speaking engagements all the time. I used to run an education program. I did talking all the time. But this “four minutes about me” was just like, “Ugh.” But I did it. Well, I haven’t done it yet, but I prepared. I prepared my flash talk. It’s about aging and adventure. It’s called “When Does the Adventure End? 30? 40? 50? 60?” Mark: Spoilers? Can you tell me when the adventure ends? Achaessa: Never. It never ends. It absolutely never ends. It just depends on how you approach it, right? /// Mark: Now how does this compare to your very first meetup? When did you join Automattic? Aaron: It was barely two months before the Grand Meetup. That was in San Francisco, and also Santa Cruz, California. Mark: How many employees at the company at that time? Aaron: Oh gosh. I think I was number 220 at that point. So it felt like a large company to me at that point, and having not come from the WordPress community. I’ve used WordPress, but I have an iOS developer background, some Android as well. My sphere did not include the community around WordPress, so I felt a bit out of sorts when I first came to the Grand Meetup because I felt like I didn’t belong. But it was maybe an hour in after sitting on the couch at the old Automattic headquarters that I immediately knew that I was at the right place, connecting with the people that were there and just felt very welcomed and included. I was already in on the jokes on day one, so it was great. Mark: That’s fantastic. So how does the vibe compare, 220 employees, to — here we are with going on over a thousand employees? Aaron: Realistically the vibe hasn’t changed all that much in my mind, because there aren’t that many times that you’re all together in the same room. So I will say that if we’re doing a major Town Hall or we’re doing a keynote and you happen to turn around, then yes, it’s very obvious that we’re a lot larger. I’m one of those people that tends to sit in the front row. So my perspective hasn’t changed all that much. When it comes to the hallway conversations, we tend to do training or classes — people hold classes for other Automatticians to teach their own things that they’ve learned. Those are still relatively the same size and those conversations haven’t really changed their format at all. So yes, we’ve grown in scale, but really the heart of what the annual Grand Meetup is, is still the same, at least in my mind. Mark: Why, if you’re a distributed company, why would you have a Grand Meetup? Why would you do this every year? Aaron: Financially it’s a hard hit on Automattic’s books because you’re flying everybody into the same space, you’re giving them a place to sleep, and feeding them fairly well, actually. But the reality is, it’s hard to quantify what the Grand Meetup gives us — in material things, swag, I guess we get. So that’s cool as an Automattician, but the reality is I’m developing relationships with people across Automattic that I may not have a chance to work with on a daily basis. I have not crossed paths with you all that much except for a few Editorial PR-related things. But we’ve had a ton of conversations at the GMs over the years and what I like to call — well we use Slack, so I’ll just say Slack. The Slack Effect is that, when I’ve met someone in person and I’ve heard their voice, and I’ve seen their eyes and their face. If I have further conversations with them after Grand Meetup, my brain has a hard time discerning whether or not the conversation happened in person or in a Slack or offline asynchronous manner. Mark: So you’re able to project that personality in conversation under all sort of communication thereafter? Aaron: Yep. If I’m reading a message from you, your personality bleeds through into how I’m interpreting things to be written. If I haven’t met someone yet, I have a general Automattician voice, [I] assume positive intent and all that. But I think it really helps make me not feel like I’m alone at my house when I have all the Automatticians’ voices, when I’m interacting with people through electronic means. So to me the Grand Meetup is essential for me to feel successful. Mark: What tips would you give in terms of how to navigate the Grand Meetup? Aaron: Listen to yourself. If you’re in a state where you are overwhelmed, or if there’s so much input — too many voices, too many smells, too many places to go — you feel like you’re being left out of things. It’s OK to just find a quiet place, sit for a bit, process your thoughts, and then continue on with the day. If you need to go hide in your room for a little while, that’s perfectly acceptable. It’s a lot to take in. You are quite literally, from waking up to going to bed, always subject to things happening. It could be meals, it could be keynotes, conversations in the hallway, and — we all work from home. We have a lot of control over our day and here you have to give up a little bit of that control, and that can be overwhelming, so, self care is really a big thing. The other tip that I would give any new Automattician is just to say hello. It’s amazing what I’ve been able to do by meeting people here at the Grand Meetup that I don’t normally work with on a daily basis. How that’s helped me even years later when, I do need to get something done for my job [that requires input from someone who] happens to work with a team that I haven’t been able to work with before. I can look at someone on a team — like, I had that conversation with them at lunch that one year, and suddenly when there’s a conversation about work, there’s a level of respect or a level of known truth coming from you to that person, because they had a previous conversation. You’re not just some unknown. It’s a very subtle difference, but just knowing who you’re talking to and having that conversation in the past has really helped me in a lot of cases. /// Mark: So what is your name? Sheri: Sheri Bigelow. Mark: And what do you do at Automattic? Sheri: I am an Excellence Wrangler, so we do automated testing, manual testing, and keeping track of all the bugs for — I specifically work with a mobile division right now. Mark: And how long have you been with Automattic? Sheri: Going on 11 years. Mark: That’s pretty close to the founding of the company, Sheri. Sheri: It’s quite close. Closer than it is far. A lot actually. Mark: So explain to me what your first Grand Meetup was like. Did you have a Grand Meetup when you started? Sheri: No. When I started, we used to all meet up at WordCamp San Francisco. Mark: Got it. Sheri: I’m very extroverted, but I was so nervous, so nervous to meet new colleagues. I looked up to everyone so much and — one thing that I still laugh about and tell quite often — I told Matt, “I love everyone.” And he just kind of looked at me and he said, “You haven’t met everyone yet.” I said, “I love them all anyway.” I was so excited. It was a really fun time.  /// Ben: Thank you, Sheri. Hello everyone, Ben Huberman here. The Grand Meetup is a huge undertaking that takes years to plan. We’ve heard from people from all over the company talk about what it’s like to attend the GM. Now let’s talk to someone who knows what it takes to actually pull it all together and make it happen. /// Ben: Okay. Hello? Megan: Hi. Ben: Could you tell us your name and title please? Megan: Megan Marcel and I am an Events Wrangler on the Events team at Automattic. Ben: Could you tell us a little bit what an Events Wrangler does? Megan: Sure, so Events at Automattic. An Events Wrangler ranges from sponsorships, to our internal meetups — and the biggest meetup being our Grand Meetup, which is when the entire company comes together for a week of team bonding and learning. Really the one time we’re all together in person. Ben: When did you start getting involved with planning this event? Megan: I got started working on the Grand Meetup when I first got here. I got off the plane at the Grand Meetup and I was helping people get on buses, but really sticking to it full time for the past two-and-a-half years, last year being the first that I completely owned the Grand Meetup. I’m leading. Ben: I can imagine that people who’ve never been to a Grand Meetup might not have quite an idea of how complicated this process is. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about what this process entails.  Megan: Right now I’m starting to plan for 2021 locations. Ben: So two years from now. Megan: Two years out. But the real planning begins about a year out. We’ll go to contracts, potentially earlier than that. And the real planning starts about six months out. That’s when we start doing it full time — all of the logistics, from people getting visas to come to the Grand Meetup, booking flights — and then we start getting to the stuff about when they are actually on site. Ben: How many people work with you on this? Cause this is a huge undertaking. Megan: It’s a huge undertaking and definitely not one I could ever do alone. We have two full-time folks that work with me on the Grand Meetup, and then our extended teams. So on site we have about 10 people dedicated to working on the Grand Meetup, and those folks will help a couple of weeks out and get them all ramped up for what’s to come on site. This way they can easily transition into the Grand Meetup once we’re here. Ben: Right. Maybe one thing that we are curious to hear about is how you choose the locations. Right now we are in Orlando.  Megan: So we want to choose a hotel that’s able to accommodate us ideally for two years in a row, because we try to go back to the same place two years. For people who attended before, it’s a little easier for them. And then us, coming to plan it — it’s a lot easier because we have those connections with the vendors that we’re working with. So everyone from the hotel to the AV team, to the transportation company and everything in between. Making sure that they can accommodate us two years in a row, that many people. And we’re also looking for a lot of meeting space. Also hotel rooms. We try to keep everyone at the same hotel — just really creating our own hotel. We actually have our logo on the building this year, on the hotel. Ben: It looks great and I know many people who listen to this could not have seen it, but it looks pretty fantastic. Megan: Yeah. So we just try to incorporate all of that and work with a hotel that understands we have a lot of different needs that we have to accommodate, with people coming from different cultures. We have different dietary [concerns], so we’re working with a chef that is willing to work with us to make sure everyone’s comfortable. Ben: What are some of the most challenging aspects of planning the GM? I can imagine that, for example, working on the menus is one of them, because there are so many parameters to consider. Are there some other things that we might not expect but in real life are super challenging? Megan: Yeah, for a couple of fun examples… My credit card has gotten declined many times —  when you try to order 600 yoga mats to do a breathwork session. Right before we were coming here we were dealing with a hurricane and an airline strike. So, trying to figure out how many people we could rebook on a flight for the very next week we have to… Ben: Sorry to cut into it, but just to make sure that we know how many people are actually here. Right now. Megan: We have 808 people here right now, not including speakers. We also wrangle all of our speakers, so all of the programming, researching speakers, then connecting with them, contracting them, getting them here, doing rehearsals with them, and we doubled the amount of external speakers we have this year for keynotes. So we have eight this year and that’s not including any of our workshop speakers who are coming in. Ben: Do you have any favorite memories either from, I know this GM has only kind of started, but I don’t know from either this one or previous ones. Moments where things kind of clicked for you and you thought, “Oh this was all worth it. All my hard work has paid off.” Megan: Yeah, just seeing people, the smiles on their faces, the small details. If someone’s birthday is this week, getting them a birthday cake, it makes a world of difference when they’re away from their families during this time. I would say being in a general session and having a speaker on stage where the audience is just completely connecting and the thank you’s and people just being so gracious. Everyone is really happy to be here, and just making those connections and seeing people make those connections is just incredible. You see it in the hallways, you see it everywhere. Also, just making the culture of Automattic come to the hotel wherever we are. It’s Automattic. /// Ben: This is Ben again. Everyone at Automattic has their own experience of distributed life. Some of us are constantly on the move. Others log into Slack from places like Tasmania or Uruguay or Nova Scotia. Some work from home, where they might also take care of family members or pets. Others, like me, mix it up a little between our home office, a favorite cafe, or a coworking space. One reason the Grand Meetup is special is that it gives us all a chance to learn from one another about what’s possible once you join a distributed company. We were able to capture a few of these stories, so let’s hear some of them. /// Will: So for the previous three years I was in a camper. I was on the back of a pickup truck and on the Pan-American Highway for the most part. There were some diversions into Brazil, into a lot of Argentina, a lot of Bolivia.  Ben: How does that even work logistically? Can you just park somewhere, get internet, and then just do your work? How does it work in reality? Will: You know, this is the age of the internet. Anything is possible. There are apps. And so we relied on an app called iOverlander. This is this crowdsourced app and it was people who lived the same lifestyle we lived. They would drop a pin on a map and they would leave a comment like, “This is a campground, it has WiFi, there’s hot water (or not), there’s electricity (or not),” or “What is the voltage?” So all of this data is all right there. And then you can spend a little bit of time extrapolating all of that data and putting it on a graph or a map or whatever. That’s how we lived, was mapping out the route based on connectivity. /// Sheri: I just joined a coworking space actually, and I don’t want to go there often, but I want to go there sometimes, so I can be in a different space and have a different experience and have some more working social time. I love-hate working from home because I’m extroverted. Love that I don’t have to do a commute. Hate that I don’t get to be around my colleagues more often. Not only that, remote. I hate that I can’t go and see friends that I’ve made at the company in the city where I live, or even several hours nearby, right? There’s friends from all over. So the Grand Meetup is really nice and really connecting, and it helps you work so much with people. /// Josepha: When I got here, everyone was like, “It’s great because you can work in your pajamas if you want to.” And for the first six months I did. I didn’t have a dedicated office area and I just sort of got up and started working whenever I felt like it, and finished working whenever I felt like it. And I found that that was not a good choice for me, especially in the work that I have to do. It ended up making me less resilient, more reactive, and also I had no concept of when work started and stopped. Our brains compartmentalize the information that we need in various places, and so when I lived and worked and did all of that stuff all in the same area, my brain was like, I guess we work all the time now, cause we work in our pajamas and we work on the sofa, which is also where we don’t work. And so this is just what we do. We work 24/7 I guess. It was a rough first year for me frankly. My first year here I really felt like Automattic and Matt had made the wrong decision in hiring me, because I was having so much trouble getting used to it. So now I have a dedicated office and I have my work computer, which does not come out of my office unless I have to write. If I write, I go to a different room that has a taller ceiling. Mark: Explain that. Josepha: I’m just going to tell you everything about how I have hacked my focus. So I have found that when I’m in a room with a shorter ceiling, I’m able to focus better. But if I have to do creative work, I have to go — or rather it is easier for me if I go to someplace with a higher ceiling, because it frees up, it just changes this idea of what I’m doing. It changes how I feel about it. And so interestingly enough, when I have to do really unpleasant writing work, which sometimes happens, I do that on airplanes, cause it’s a very constrained space, but I’m 30,000 feet in the air. I don’t have any place to go. I’m very focused, but I still I’m able to get that really creative, generative feeling so that I can get the writing done, because I’m flying through the sky on a tin bus. Mark: So when you’ve got a tough email to write, you’ll just book a flight somewhere? Josepha: Yes, I do all my emails on airplanes. No, no. If I have a tough email to write, generally for an email because it’s that short, I will just get up and walk into the high-ceilinged room and then walk back to my computer. /// Mark: That’s great. Now tell me, at home in your house, tell me about how you work at home, and where that is, and what your days look like. Aaron: My day’s fairly structured in terms that — I get up in the morning, I put the coffee on and I change clothes. I don’t work in pajamas normally, so I have a ritual where I feel like I’m starting work. I’ll hop online and check out things that people have messaged me about overnight. My team is very geographically diverse, so when I come online in the morning, they’ve been working for several hours, if not longer. So I’m playing a little bit of catch up, but I also don’t let that be the focus of my morning. I figure out “Where am I most useful at this point in time?” Because within maybe an hour or two, some people may be going offline. So there’s very little chance for overlap with a lot of people on my team. About midday, it’s when I usually try to get outside. I have ADD, Attention Deficit Disorder, and did not realize that until I started at Automattic. So one of the founding things that I realized — in order for me to be successful, I need to do some sort of physical activity at some point during the day to help reset my brain. It feels like I’ve had a good night’s rest and it’s like another cup of coffee, if you will, but it sustains me for the rest of the day. Then I don’t feel like I’m trapped within the four walls of my office. So I’m also one of those weirdos that’s out at -10 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter, going for a run. Just because the feeling of being outdoors is really what recharges me, and then I come back and finish my workday. Sometimes I’ll split it up and get some tasks done during the light hours and then in the evening I might catch up a little bit on the things that were maybe less deep work. So, shallow work — things that maybe don’t need my full concentration. Mark: One of the interesting things I’ve noticed is that Automattic has the ADDmatticians channel and neurodiversity channels for folks to swap tips. What are some things that have been shared among the group in terms of how distributed work works for neurodiversity and for how you work within that? Aaron: I think the big takeaway is that like most people that belong to any type of unique group, if you have neurodiversity, it means a lot of things. It includes people on [the] autism scale or in my case, Attention Deficit Disorder. In my mind it’s a collection of things that you can’t see that affect a person to see or feel the world differently. So the biggest takeaway that I have, that I’ve shared with other people, is that you have to be responsive to your own signs of being overwhelmed. You have to — self-care is a really simple way of putting it, but you have to develop a mechanism to address when you are feeling overwhelmed. I’ve tried to lead my team with vulnerability, both from myself, and I try to encourage other people to be vulnerable. I think that’s what the ADDmatticians channel and being open about neurodiversity does, is that it establishes that we all have — I’m not going to call them faults — but we have unique things about ourselves that are different. You can only work better with people if you know what unique things make them different from yourself. In my case specifically with ADD, if I’m having a day where I can’t concentrate, it affects how I’m leading a meeting or how I’m having a broken conversation with someone because I’m doing several different things. Then I’ve asked people to call me out if they feel like I’m not giving them the focus that they need. So I’ve been very open with how my brain works and if I tell people, look, I need to go out and go for a run, my brain’s just not working. They know that I’m not just trying to get away from them. They just know that I’m trying to be in the right moment or in the right spot for them and it’s — I don’t know how I could do that without coming across as being non-committed to the team, without telling them with honesty about what is going on in my brain. So me leaving them to go for a run doesn’t mean that my running is more important than them. I’m actually doing this to help me be a better team lead and a better coworker. Mark: It seems to me overall that distributed work is a huge positive for those that are differently-wired or operate different. Just in terms of — you’re in control of your surroundings in a much deeper way than having to go into an office. Is that your finding? Aaron: It is, for those of us that are fortunate to have the ability to have a quiet space or to be able to model an office that supports their needs. I feel very fortunate that I’m in a place where I could buy a house that’s more suburb or more rural, and I don’t have a neighbor necessarily outside the window with a leaf blower during the middle of the day. I feel empowered to be able to change things, to make the environment as best as it can be. There’s no requirement for me to have a certain chair or certain desk, and granted, Automattic does give us the ability to buy a really great chair and a really great desk and have the computers that we need, so that eliminates that from being a concern, which is a huge deal for me. Having a great posture and having comfortable things to work on, that’s a majority of what I need. But not everybody else, from previous jobs I’ve worked in — places where the air conditioning didn’t work right. Or one person was fiddling with the thermostats. I have complete control over that. I can move the thermostat as much or as little as I want. Or if I’m having a day where I just want to go work outside, grab the laptop — as long as the WiFi reaches, I’m good to go.  /// Josepha: I’ve worked in high-stress environments my entire career, so being resilient no matter where you’re working has always been very important to me. And this is a particularly difficult thing, because when you work in a distributed fashion — and I work with the open-source community, so volunteers also — all three of the major risk factors for anyone working with employees come into play there. So you have to delegate things. And for volunteers you’re not delegating, you’re asking them to take part in that. So you are delegating things, which is this huge level of risk. You have all these people that are far away from you so you don’t see them every day, not only [do you not] see them physically every day, but so often we lose track of them because your DMs close so that there’s less noise, but then you forget to go and reach out, and so there’s that one. And then of course the third one, which is the fact that we work in a cross-cultural space, not only geographically cross-cultural, but for the community itself, for open-source WordPress, the different cultures of distributed work versus co-located work. Those are massively different cultures. And if you’re not aware of how that works versus this works, those two different entities, you never have any concept of how to invite yourself into the space in a way that that works for both sides. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to make sure that all of my teams are resilient because we do really hard work on behalf of the community and on behalf of Automattic in the community. And it’s important to me that they’re happy and healthy and safe for as long as they want to work here. Mark: That’s great. Can I ask you about Slack real quick? Josepha: Mm-hmm. Mark: So do you have Slack on your phone? Josepha: I do. Mark: You talk about keeping your computer room and having a set specific time in which work and personal do not overlap as much. How do you deal with that, with your phone and managing your own phone time and asynchronous versus synchronous? Josepha: I feel like Slack has become the new email. So there’s that. And I do have Slack on my phone. I am in about 15 different Slack channels — Slack instances on my computer, but only two on my phone. One that is Automattic and one that is the WordPress community, not in anything else. And that is specifically for emergency situations, or when I know I have to be moving, but I want to be able to be available for people. I am incredibly aggressive with my do-not-disturb time. It starts at 8:00 PM every night and turns off at 7:00 AM the next morning. And mostly it’s there in case I need it. And I have just convinced myself of that to be true. That’s the only way. A lot of times you just have to remind yourself constantly “this is not for me to be a slave to that information.” It’s in the event I have to get it. And so there’s that. But also I have themed days for what I work on, and also specific times of day where people can expect me to actively reach out and answer their questions. So at 10:00 AM and at 4:00 PM I will go through and respond to any open questions that people have given me over the course of the day or the evening. And I have themed days. So Wednesday, I always do my community check-ins. I check in all the team reps — well not all of them, as many team reps as I can get hold of. I check in with all of them all day on Wednesday. Thursday is a strategy day, so everybody comes into basically a very long meeting with me where they can drop in and out and discuss strategy problems that they have. And Fridays are when I follow up on everything that people need to be responding to me about that they’ve forgotten about. And then Monday is internal Automattic days. Tuesday is external blogger for the community days. I don’t know why I started with Wednesday and worked my way back around. /// Mark: So you have not only worked in this structure for a long time, but you’ve studied it and written about it for a long time. How would you say Automattic’s distributed work model has evolved while you’ve been here? Erin: It’s super fascinating for me because I come from a background in consulting where I was actually helping enterprise companies to work better together. And one of the first things I understood coming here is that the way Automattic was organized, even at the smaller size it was, is that a lot of the practices inside Automattic at that small size were the same practices that I was trying to put in place for companies 1000, 10,000-people large. So I was like, “Oh, that’s interesting. They’re already doing all the good practices because working remotely forces them to.” So that was one of the very first insights I had because that also means that scaling that stops being a logistical issue, a tool issue, and you can focus all your efforts, instead of on the people on the leadership, on the processes. So all the things that instead are actually the problems between people that need to scale. And I think that’s one of the biggest advantages we had. And that hasn’t changed because we were 200 people. We were using certain tools. Yeah. The chart we were using at the time is not the same chart we use today, but it’s still the same kind of scope and tool. And we are now a thousand people roughly. And this structure in that sense is still the same. Mark: Now given that you have studied this, written about it, consulted — what is Automattic doing right and wrong with distributed work? We must have some bad habits that exist, that maybe frustrate you. Erin: Yes. So let’s start from this. What we’re doing right is, in terms of what is usually referred for example, as a flat organization — but we’re not flat. So the way I would define is that, there is no boundary in contacting anyone in the company. I should probably find a better, catchier way to say this, but we have a hierarchy, but the point is not the hierarchy. The point is that I can reach anyone in the company in any given time and, may actually encourage it to do that, if there is effectiveness. Again, you touched on a topic that is not really about the tools, right? It’s more about the culture and interaction between people. And I think that there’s a little bit of an obsession in the sense that, “Oh, the company’s failing because this information that I used to post, before everyone read it and suddenly I have a problem because I don’t know anymore where to post or where to discuss things.” But we grew, right? We are a larger company and we all know from, for example, social psychology, that we can hold in our mind roughly 200 people, 250 people, as our close connections. And of course it doesn’t limit work, but let’s assume for a second that 200 people is limited to work. Now if you’re a 200-people company, you pretty much know exactly where to send the right message to the right people. It’s natural, it’s implicit. You don’t even think twice. Where you are a 500, a 1000-people company, 10,000-people company, suddenly you’re like, “Oh, wait a minute, my information. How to propagate? How to make sure the right people listen to it?” This is not a problem solved with any tool. It just a matter of skill. Shaping the information channels is part of, in a way, the management, the leadership that should act as a filter. And this is one of the reasons why I’m not a huge fan of flat organizations because I believe that a structure — organization hierarchy works, if it’s a communication hierarchy. It doesn’t work if it’s a power hierarchy, but if it’s a communication hierarchy, it’s effective in helping convey this message. /// Mark: Hi everybody, Mark here again. Distributed work is a mode of doing work. But it also changes the ways we live our lives, and it expands the possibilities for work/life balance. Ben and I talked with some folks about what distributed work means to them, and some of the conversations that came out of that were pretty moving. Here’s Ben speaking with Will Brubaker to start us off.  /// Ben: What are some of the other challenges that being part of a distributed team like yours bring into the picture that you wouldn’t necessarily encounter if you’re all in the same office? Will: Well, time zones is kind of obvious. When are people awake? This is also very important to “When can we have the best impact? Where are the people who use our product? What time of day are they asking for help? What time of day do they need our help? When do we need to be solving problems?” So we have to balance all of that out between our own needs because we do have our own lives, and we have people in our orbit — our spouses, our children, our parents, our friends, our — everybody. So we have to balance all of that. Ben: Do you have any kind of system or tools that help you stop work when it’s done? Cause one of the challenges of being at a distributed team is that, if you work from home, for example, your home and your office are the same space. Will: Boy, this is a… Yeah, your home and your office is the same space, and this is such an interesting thing. And also your question about how do you balance all of this. It becomes a question of “Do I work from home or do I live at work?” And that’s its own thing. Ben: Is it still a work-in-progress for you or is it something you’ve figured out by now? Will: You know, I’m very much in a transition mode right now myself in a lot of ways. And this is — part of the changes that have occurred as the company has grown over the last couple of years is that we have to be a little bit more rigid. We’re covering a lot more ground. Things are happening a lot more rapidly. We have to be able to react in a much more predictable way now. So I need to be able to say that, you know, next Tuesday I am working from this hour to this hour, and I need to commit to that. And so this has been a challenge to get there, but it’s also… I also get to decide that. So if I need to move all of my work hours until the afternoon so that I can do the things that I’m obligated to in the day, I can do that. When we were asked to start working weekends, I was a little bit resentful about that, and I had a very, very strong team lead who supported me, and we ended up working out a really brilliant solution where now I am working every Sunday and I am happy about it, where I was digging my heels in against working weekends. But we found a way to make this work to my benefit, to the company’s benefit and it’s a win-win situation, and this is the company that allows that to happen. Ben: What are the benefits to being — you just mentioned a couple, but what are some other things that have made working for a distributed company better for you or for your life in general? Will: To put it in the simplest of terms, I’m working for a company that allows me to be me, and I believe that to be true across the board. And I look at people who were in onesies as cartoon characters, and this is who they want to be. And everybody is really cool with that. /// Rocío: There is a map where you can see all the heads of Automatticians. I was the only one there in that super big island full of snow. Basically, my husband got an offer, a very interesting professional experience to work there. And it was scary at the beginning, but we said, “Hey, let’s take the chance, let’s have that adventure and let’s see how it is.” There is nothing to lose. So I was working remotely at that time already. And living there, it was when I joined Automattic, because for me it was clear. I want to work remotely to be able to live there. So for me, it was awesome. It felt like, “Wow, I can be here, in Greenland, in this extreme weather, right. And to be working for a company that I love and doing what I love without a problem. Wow, that’s a nice feeling.” If someone wants to try to work remotely, I will say “Try.” And don’t expect people to be behind your shoulder checking work you’re doing. Just be proactive on finding solutions, doing stuff, and asking for answers when you don’t know how to do something. When you’re working remotely it’s very, very important to communicate as much as possible with your colleagues because it’s the only way for you to say, “Hey, I’m here,” and to learn from them. If you are in the office and you are new and you don’t know things, you just turn your shoulder to the right and ask for questions to your colleague next to you. But we don’t have that when working remotely. So I will say if you don’t feel secure about things, just ask. Because in this company, everybody knows that communication is oxygen, and we really apply it. Ask for questions. People are going to be helpful and never, never feel ashamed of it. /// Mark: As you can hear, there’s so much more to distributed work than hanging out at home all day. Here at Automattic, we try to find solutions that make our work more effective and collaborative — but it also allows us to tailor our own work and environment based on how we’re wired. My colleague Aaron Douglas has some great insights on this…  /// Mark: Now, you wrote a blog post that made the rounds inside of Automattic. Which is basically, How Remote Work Saved my Life. Aaron: Right? Yep. That’s it. Mark: So tell me a little bit about that. Aaron: About two months after I started Automattic, I was overwhelmed, and I knew that my brain works differently than a lot of people, in terms of my focus and attention. It was never really an issue because I had ways of handling that, and actually working in a regular office where you’re constantly being interrupted, being asked to come into meetings, or the person next to you starts having a conversation you’re listening in. It actually worked really well with how my brain’s wired, but then when I started working at home alone, it was really only my own mind defeating myself. So it was all on me to keep that train going during the day. I didn’t know how to cope with it though and so I talked to my physician to say, “Hey, I think I have ADD, I think I’ve had this all my life, but I’ve just never needed to worry about it.” So that sent me on a path of talking with a counselor, [to] start developing a tool box of things to help combat the issues I was having with focus. The frustration was pretty real and I needed to walk away from my computer one day and it was, I literally walked outside, took a short walk, which is something that normally I’ve been doing. In a regular office, you go for a walk during lunch and you come back all sweaty and you’re worrying about smelling and not every place has a great shower room. It just was an excuse for me not to do something more physical during the day. But at home, who am I trying to impress? As long as I look presentable for a webcam, I can wait till midday to take a shower if I want to go for a walk. But what I realized early on is that, when I came back from those walks, my brain felt almost reset for the rest of the day, and that turned into a daily habit over time. There’s a lot of bits of story in between, but essentially, I went from the occasional walk, to riding my bike, and then to doing running as well, and it’s now a daily habit. I feel strange when I don’t have the ability to get outside and do that exercise, and it’s part of my toolbox. Before I started at Automattic, I was having issues with atrial fibrillation, and that is where the electrical system — your heart just goes wonky and it doesn’t beat right. The major issue with that is it can induce strokes, because when your heart’s in a stopped pattern, and the blood’s in an area where it shouldn’t be, it can pool and form a clot and that can go into your brain. So I was really scared when I heard that. So that combined with needing to be outside, to help reset the brain, which is like a one-two punch to motivate me. My focus this entire time has just been on my focus. The side effect is that I’m actually, I’m over a hundred pounds lighter than I was before starting at Automattic. I feel like even though I’ve aged, I feel like I’m healthier and I feel younger than I have, and I attribute a lot of that to Automattic and working remote, my coworkers for helping encourage me, and finding friends to just socially run with them, like Strava, Runkeeper, one of those services. That’s been a big part of what’s kept me going and now I’m returning the favor, and also helping other people motivate themselves. So yeah, that’s effectively how I think Automattic helped me save my life. Because I’ve gone from being dependent on medication for atrial fibrillation and feeling defeated, to feeling fairly successful with my attention problems and being off of the medication for my heart, and overall just being in a healthier place. Matt: Hey everybody. Matt Mullenweg here again. As Automattic has grown, so has the number of perspectives on the freedom, flexibility, and occasional challenges that come with distributed work. It’s really amazing and humbling to listen to these stories, and to be able to relive the magic of the Grand Meetup too. Thanks to everyone who shared, and to Mark Armstrong and Ben Huberman for capturing these powerful stories. As you’ve heard, hosting the Grand Meetup every year takes a lot of work. Booking hundreds of flights and hotel rooms, the food, the speakers…it’s a lot! But we think the value of the connections that people forge with their coworkers vastly outweighs the cost, which is now getting into the millions of dollars. This meetup, and the smaller ones that our individual teams have throughout the year, are vital for a distributed company. On the next episode of the Distributed podcast, I’m going to catch up with an old acquaintance of mine, Anil Dash. Anil is a pioneer who really helped define what blogging looked like back in the early aughts. He cares a lot about the Web and about technology, the direction both are going, and how they affect everyone.  Anil runs a semi-distributed company called Glitch, which has developed a social platform for building and sharing apps. The team at Glitch puts lots of thought into creating a work environment that centers employees’ wellbeing. I’m interested to learn how the company’s decision to go distributed fits into their commitment to employee care. They have an office in New York, as well as being distributed, which is also very interesting to me, now having an office in New York at Tumblr.  Thanks so much for listening and see you next time.