Distributed, with Matt Mullenweg

Read more about Clark Valberg in “Building the Tools that Bring the Screen to Life.” Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. InVision CEO Clark Valberg needed a tool to help his distributed team collaborate on design projects. So he created it — and it became the company’s flagship product, one that every Fortune 100 company now uses. In this episode, Clark joins our host Matt Mullenweg to discuss how he built his distributed company, and how that structure informs InVision’s collaborative-design products. The full episode transcript is below. *** MATT MULLENWEG: Howdy howdy. Welcome to the Distributed podcast. I’m your host, Matt Mullenweg.  My guest this week is Clark Valberg, the founder and CEO of InVision, a company that makes a collaborative design platform that’s very popular with distributed teams. It does ideation, design, prototyping, sharing… and it all lives in the cloud. No more emailing files back and forth — it’s pretty slick.  Clark founded the company seven years ago in Brooklyn, and now they have over 5 million users at places like Airbnb, Amazon, Netflix, Starbucks, and my company, Automattic. Like Automattic, InVision is fully distributed. And they’re similar to us in size, so I’m interested to hear from Clark about his experience leading and growing a distributed workforce.  Alrighty. Let’s get started. MATT MULLENWEG: Welcome, Clark. CLARK VALBERG: Hey, great to be here. MATT: Y’all are one of the other big fully distributed companies. Tell me a little bit first about what InVision does for people in a cave who might not know yet. And tell me a little bit about the scale of what y’all are doing in the — CLARK: That was my opening to you, by the way. Oh y’all are one of the other largest remote companies. This is a constant debate, by the way, internally, which one is bigger. CLARK: Okay so Clark is the CEO and Founder of a company called InVision. InVision is a design collaboration platform. Most of the products — I hope most of the products — that you use everyday, if they’re well designed, if you love them, if you feel excited about how they work and how they fit into your life, it’s because the design of the product is good. And so that’s where InVision comes in. We are the place where those products are designed, tested. We’re the stakeholders that make that product great, are engaged, we are both the design tool and the place. MATT: So if you were to describe what it’s like to use an InVision product. Let’s say I’m a designer, I’m collaborating with another designer, what will we do? CLARK: If you are a digital product designer, you need a place to design, you need the place to actually create the screens that make your product beautiful. That’s InVision. MATT: So before, I would do this in Photoshop on my computer and now it’s happening in a web app? CLARK: Photoshop or a cave wall, depending on how old school you are. So yes, you would’ve done that there and now you do that [in] InVision and then InVision is also the place where that design comes to life in a collaborative sense. It’s the place where you put your design so that others can look at it, engage with it, give you feedback on it. The question you’re asking is fundamental to this transition of design altogether, which I can talk about for a long time, but design is no longer a job to be done, it’s now an organizational discipline in a world where the screen has become the most important place, or one of the most important places in the world. MATT: When and how did design become important to you? CLARK: I ran an agency and dealt with what was the general operating dynamic of agencies at that time, and probably still today in many respects. You have a client, they have an idea of what they want, they have some business problem they’re trying to solve and you’re trying to put together some kind of a requirements document, some kind of a contract that hopes to look into the future and imagine everything they’ll ever need to accomplish whatever business goal they’re trying to accomplish, and define that today, or at least in the next few hours until we can get this thing signed and move forward. So this idea of up-front definition bothered me, that was a deep intellectual itch. How can I, instead of creating a contract that separates me from the client and hopefully mitigates the legal risk of giving them exactly what I told them that I would give them, and we’re charging by the hour, how could I align my values and go on this journey with them together side by side? How could I act as their guide toward the business reality that we would ultimately end up discovering together? Any time there’s a client, there’s that dynamic of — you know what you want in your head; it’s impossible for me to get that out of your head and get it into my head. And by the way, even if I could, hopefully if we do something right that will change over time, the more articulate that vision of the future becomes. MATT: How did this agency look? Clients, were you meeting them in person, were your colleagues in person? CLARK: Both. It was my first dip of toes into the world of being able to work with people seamlessly online. So a lot of the fundamental inventions, collaborative inventions that we have here at InVision — 900 people, totally remote — came from that world of just trying to make clients happy at a much smaller scale, sometimes remote. MATT: How big did the agency get before you switched to doing the product work as your primary thing? CLARK: The biggest ever? I think it got to 25 tops. So it was a small agency. The word “boutique” sounds much better than small, doesn’t it? MATT: There’s probably a lot of people [who are] part of or running agencies, listening to this [who have] that dream of switching to be a product company. What advice do you have for them? What made it work for you? Because there’s so many examples of that not working. CLARK: I’ll tell you, I did not have a vision of becoming a product company. It happened as an extension to the reason why we started this agency in the first place. So the agency was founded on, “Hey, instead of ending up in these weird litigious, semi-adversarial relationships with clients, what if we could figure out a different operating model, a different communication model?” So we started by building prototypes, and we would write those prototypes in code, we would show them to clients early, we’d be able to have a diverse conversation across the organization, instead of just dealing with one project manager, we’d be able to embrace all the different business leaders that represented the parts of the business that we were trying to serve with the software. We’d have holistic, multi-dimensional, diverse conversations. That was the whole idea. I wanted to be an agency that loves its clients. I want to be on the same side of the table. These were all the different key words, [laughs] the key phrases that we used to make ourselves sound different and differentiate. But I think it sprung from a place of what we saw wrong with the industry. And then that tool called a prototype just evolved over time.   And at some point someone — not me — said “Hey, what if we just took designs out of Photoshop and connected them together and turned them into a little simulation that was almost as high-fidelity as the coded prototypes that you were building? It would be almost good enough and probably you could — we’ll just run it as an experiment but it’ll take an eighth of the time to build and maybe we can use that as a communication device.” MATT: Who was the first client you tried that on? CLARK: It was a company in upstate New York. So this is one of our few fully, fully remote engagements, like we went to see them maybe once a quarter but other than that everything was happening online. I’ll reserve the name but a large education-product company. They created educational products that they sold into school districts. And we were building essentially a totally custom ERP solution for them — every part of their entire business modeled into a piece of software, every experience that exists between two people in that entire company was modeled into a screen some place. MATT: Wow. CLARK: So a very sophisticated piece of software. And it would have been an absolute nightmare had we not employed this process because there were just too many stakeholders with too great a diversity of perspective on what needed to be built, and it just had to be a conversation that happened over time. This was a “Let’s try this new thing. What do we call this new thing?” I think literally the time that we’ve been on this call so far was the time it took us to come up with the name InVision. [laughter] I think it was the second idea, like, “Oh, we’ll just change it later, that’s fine.” And we had absolutely no interest, almost an explicit disinterest, in having anyone outside of the company know what this thing was. This was just for internal use only. Somebody even said “Hey, what if we wrote a blog post about this? What if we..?” And once it worked, once we saw that it would totally change the game for us, and it really did in very profound ways, this is like a whole new movement for agencies, this would be a cool thing to talk about. I said, “Absolutely not. This is our differentiator, this is our competitive advantage in this agency, maybe let’s just keep this under hat.” MATT: Ha! CLARK: Luckily someone — it’s good to have a lot of people who disagree with you all the time around you, otherwise you end up being a victim of your own vision. MATT: So at this time, it sounds like you have an office and colleagues in that office. At what point did you switch to being fully remote and using these tools to enable that? CLARK: Even the agency was hybrid. And in New York City, my entire movement into a fully remote world — again, never had a vision for it, didn’t think this was the future. I’m still not sure if it’s the future for everyone, okay, this is a matter of significant debate and worthy of debate. It was a necessity thing. So the agency was a hybrid but let’s call it a reluctant hybrid, like “Hey, we can’t find enough people in New York so we’ll hire people who aren’t here and we’ll just deal with the overhead and managing that overhead, that collaborative overhead as a cost of doing business.” When we transitioned into InVision, so yada, yada, yada — we’re yada yada yada-ing through the birth of an entire company — but this product is cool, what if other people liked it? Let’s put it in front of the world and see if they bite. They did. We raised some capital and then we had to transition out of the agency and into the product company. I sold the agency to a — basically a hostile takeover. I sold it to my wife for a dollar. Literally, it’s a whole big story where the company, InVision, sort of launched its for-pay model on my wedding day. So here we are with $1.1 million and an office that my co-founder and I are sitting back-to-back in a tiny Regus space in midtown Manhattan. I think it was the year that Google opened up the Google megaplex — I don’t know if it has an official name, but the building in Chelsea? MATT: Yes. CLARK: We just found that every conversation we were having with an engineer, designer, anybody, everyone — they were also talking to Google, they were also talking to Yahoo and Facebook. Anybody with a New York office with a more fashionable name and better ping-pong tables to our no-ping-pong tables was just destroying us for talent, and I found that we were spending all of our time wining and dining engineers we weren’t hiring. MATT: Wow. CLARK: And so we got together after about three weeks of slogging through this talent thicket, and asked ourselves an existential question. We did what we called a pre-postmortem — I’m sure you’ve heard this idea. Let’s look into the future, let’s imagine the things that don’t work out and let’s guess, based on what we know today, what are the likely sources of that failure? And the biggest one for me was not spending enough time on the things that really make a business successful. At the end of the day, product-market fit is where it’s at, at this critical birthing stage. We have to get a group of people vehemently, maybe violently excited about this new product and talking about it to people. It has to have independent lift, it has to have word of mouth, groundswell. And what will we probably be doing instead of focusing on the design of the product, the marketing of the product? We’ll probably be trying to hire engineers and moving way too slow. And we just opened up the envelope. And again, it may not have been me, somebody thought, “What if we just hired the people that we had worked with as contractors in the agency?” We had a pretty significant bench of folks that we pulled in who were full-time other places and just did little side jobs for us in exotic, far-flung destinations like Phoenix, Arizona… Houston, Texas. Places that were secondary, tertiary tech markets, folks that we just knew, knew from conferences, because they were developers in the same language that we were developers in — what if we just hired them full time? So we said, what if we just did this at scale? What if we somehow figured out how to make collaboration work where everyone was remote? And I had a piece of advice. I don’t know if he even knows that he gave me this advice and how pivotal it was for me. Do you know David Cancel from Drift? I called him up. He had just sold a company to HubSpot. I ran the idea by him, like, “Hey, what do you think about this remote idea? What do you think about this talent hack — instead of hiring people in New York, we’ll hire them anywhere. We’ll actually pay them above market.” That was our thesis originally, to pay them above their local market but arguably below the New York market.  And there is a very, very wide spread there, at least there was then even more so than it is today. And then sell them on this lifestyle change. Sell them on getting rid of their commute, sell them on work/life integration. This is the time where everybody talked about — the common theme was work/life separation — how do I turn off my phone, how do I turn off my email at a certain time a day? We said, well, the people that we work with, they were moonlighting for us while working full time, they clearly have more passion, more interest in being involved in the work they do than 9-5, so maybe it’s not about a certain time of the day where you just die from work. Maybe it’s about having more control over when and how. Maybe there’s a work/life integration idea that we can start selling people that may actually be more meaningful than that separation. And he liked the idea but he gave me a piece of very firm advice that we still follow today, which, you’re not following, by the way. I just want to throw this out there. It’s don’t go half in/half out on this. There has to be a sense that everyone has equal access to the executive team, to each other. And the way he put it, which I thought was a beautiful way to encapsulate it — there can’t be a place where someone is not. Your office, whether if they work in marketing, it’s the head of marketing. Everyone has to feel equal proximity. MATT: And that avoids a classic problem, right, why I actually don’t like the term remote, that some people are more like second class citizens in the — CLARK: 100%. You have a room and then there’s that guy on the wall who’s trying to get a word in edgewise. I said, “Well how far do we go with that? Can we have some kind of a New York office?” He said, “I would say not.” And I think the next week my partner and I decided to disband the office, to shut down the office and to actually go home and work. Even though we had been commuting into the city — I live in Brooklyn and he lived in Manhattan, he was a few blocks away from the office — even though we had been commuting and spending time together in person, and you’d think, “Oh the founding team, they have to get together and they have to collaborate, move at warp speed and problem solving and collaboration.” I said, “I think we should discipline ourselves to be able to make this remote thing work even between us, and if we can figure that out, then that will scale to everyone else.” Big decision. Bold. I would say it was an absurd decision in some respects. [laughs] MATT: I would call it radical actually, yeah, especially for the time. Because what year was this? CLARK: Eight, nine years ago now. MATT: Yeah. CLARK: The only company that promoted itself as remote or promoted the idea of being remote or distributed was 37 Signals. And so they were the original inspiration for this or at least inspired us to believe it was possible. MATT: Totally. CLARK: So we did it, said “Hey, this is a design problem essentially, like many things in life. We’ll just design the people, practices, and platforms of the business.” We think about these three Ps all the time to establish a healthy rhythm of connection. And by the way, Joel Spolsky, another — I’m just calling out all the inspirations for this because it definitely didn’t come for me — wrote a book called “Joel On Software,” which I’m sure you’ve read, everyone has read. MATT: Classic. I highly recommend it actually. CLARK: Classic. He was a proponent of this idea of having an office with a door that closes. Now we think about it as deep work. This is a common theme that’s used in tech today. And I had this thought — I’m still not sure how valid it is — but that the percentage of intellectual focus — deep work — that happens in your business is a significant driver or limiter of the success of that business, to some degree. If you have a large group of people who are really talented and have a lot of time to focus on the work they do well, and there’s an environment that brings them together when they need to be, but that ebb and flow of focus time, that intimate craft time and that kinetic energy of collaboration, but not at the same time. There is a dual-modality model that one can leverage to get the best out of both. MATT: What percentage do you target for yourself there, and what percentage would you target for an individual contributor with a vision? CLARK: The more creative your work, the more focus you need to move through the work that you do. I think real creative work is done alone. You know when you need to collaborate, you know when you need that validation from a third party, or your rate of innovation starts to slow to a certain point where you need to start sparking and stoking those flames of creativity through communication with other people. You have to build a system that makes that reliably happen at least at some point for each person on the team. So early days, we had a stand-up, every team in the company. At that time we had three teams and 15 people. Every team had a stand-up. That stand-up had a ritual. It happened at the exact same time every single day. So 1:00, whole company, three or four questions. I think it evolved from three to four questions for each person, round robin. Obviously that’s much more difficult to pull off at 900, but that is scaled in different ways. Let’s make sure that everyone knows or is aware of the work that everyone else is doing. That’s the fundamental platform that creates that connection. And then people go off and they do their own work as individuals or as groups, and they reconvene regularly to check back in. MATT: So if I were an ideal designer or developer at InVision in this model, would I be spending 80-90% of my time in this deep work? CLARK: I would imagine probably 70. I think probably people at InVision would tell you that they get less than that because there are many meetings, and at scale, obviously there’s an overhead, a connective tissue overhead to managing very large projects at scale that are cut across multiple departments and disciplines. Again, there’s no perfect formula, it’s just making sure that people can preserve that time, or as much of that time as they can. MATT: I have a selfish question, which is, as a CEO of a distributed company, what do you think your percentage is of that work? CLARK: Mine is probably closer to 30%. I’m not a production person. I don’t have a work product necessarily that I put into the world. I don’t have a screen that needs to be designed to an excruciating level of detail and iterated on over time. MATT: I would say at this moment I’m probably under 10%. So that’s something I’m working on increasing because I feel like the time I’m able to invest in writing helps a lot, and the company is, of course, a product I think about a ton, and need to spend more time than I currently am investing in how that product is designed — the product of Automattic itself. CLARK: Here’s a little weird hack. I don’t know if this makes any sense for folks. I like to sometimes just go to conferences, even though I’m 50% interested in the content, just because being at a conference blocks off your schedule, it puts you in a room with a lot of that kinetic energy, of buzz, of people who aren’t distracting you because they don’t have any interest in you, they’re there for other things, they have no connection to you, but it’s a room that’s vibrant with the energy of people. And there is someone talking and there’s time in between. And I find that just disconnecting and absorbing ideas on drip ambiently gives me a ton of headspace to have divergent thinking time. MATT: That’s a cool hack. Now we opened a lot of threads there. I’m going to loop back to some of them. One, if you were doing a pre-postmortem today for InVision, what would be on your list? CLARK: Oh without a question it’s the cohesion of the company. I mean it’s a risk being a remote company. There are things that happen in a co-located environment — that’s what we call the world of on-site work, co-located — there are things that happen there between the seams that people don’t even understand are happening. They don’t consider it an explicit part of the work. A loose example — the watercooler. There is this — I’m bumping into people in the kitchen, in the hall. There’s this ambient transfer of energy through “Hey, you’re working on this? Hey what are you up to?” We have to figure out how to allow that to happen deliberately. If what we’re doing now is 80% as good as being in-person in some ways and 130% better than being in-person in other ways, how do we make sure that we take that 80 and get it to 100 so that we’re not leaving a liability on the table? MATT: I’m particularly curious about that watercooler. What did you figure out and what has worked well so far? CLARK: What I have learned in these settings is driving to solutions in real time. Again, going back to that ebb and flow of together time and alone time, it doesn’t work in larger groups of people. You can seed things, you can create good traction around the idea, but I think a longer, more thoughtful, more deep-work-enabled process of driving to a solution is important. Where we are beginning to think about this is making sure that the time that we have together as an executive team, even the online time — two hours every two weeks we have something called the Strategic Alignment Team Meeting — so that group of people meets online, just putting more ceremony on that. So rather than getting together and just having a random group listing of things that we want to get through, maybe doing a little bit more pre-work. So one idea that surfaced was taking a facilitator that wasn’t a part of the group — the Head of Biz Ops or Chief of Staff — and making that person responsible for interviewing all the members of that team individually, one on one, with a set of pre-defined prompts to pull out the value and get that value on the agenda ahead of time. Because if I pulled you into a meeting, Matt, right after this call — I don’t know if you have a meeting right after our little podcast here, but if you did. you probably would not be in a state to pull out the most important thing that’s going on in the business or the biggest threat or the biggest opportunity or some weird HR thing, or opportunity or great idea that you thought about two weeks ago. You wouldn’t be in a state to evoke that unless you’re just a — you meditate a lot more than I do. I don’t know. There has to be a mechanism, I think, for tilling that soil with those executives ahead of time, or with anybody in that case, ahead of time. So how do we create a list of questions? For example, what’s the biggest threat to the timelines that you’re facing, what’s the biggest HR or people or resource or talent issue that you’re facing? I’m just making up examples of kinds of questions we would ask. What’s the thing that you need the most from who on this team? I’m imagining a world where there are about five or six questions that we ask each executive one-on-one before getting into that meeting and that those questions ultimately end up tilling the soil and driving the agenda of the meeting. MATT: One thing that I’ve heard that’s unique about InVision that I’d love to confirm is that y’all have everyone on East Coast office hours? CLARK: I do believe that you need a certain number of hours of overlap. So we have a kind of a loosely held standard set of operating hours. I think it’s like 10AM to 6PM. The recommendation that is fairly closely held is that there should be a three hour overlap between most of the team because within those three hours you can negotiate when your stand-up meeting is. If you’re a team that works together, you can get to the wide-wide meetings, generally speaking, unless some people in Australia watch those the next day or a week later. I don’t know what the time is in Australia right now but you get the idea. Generally try to aim for three hours of overlap. MATT: So does that mean you don’t have many people in the Asia Pacific region? CLARK: I would say not by design. We probably lean out of hiring one-off individuals. We’ve done acquisitions, for example in Australia. We do have people in Asia Pacific for sure, but there is probably a light bias towards folks that fit into teams that have a schedule with more overlap. MATT: The number I heard for you all, and this is the other day, is around 20 or 25 countries that you’re in? CLARK: It’s got to be. Yes. I mean 900 people? Yes, probably 25 countries I would imagine. MATT: We’re at a very similar size, I think we’re at 68 countries. I would say there’s definitely a cost and a tradeoff to having that kind of time zone overlap as an explicit part of the hiring, and it definitely means that there are certain teams that are more Asia-Pacific-centric, because that overlap is important. And if you have a single team with people in what I think are the three zones, South America, Europe, Africa, and then Asia Pacific, there is no good time for anybody. CLARK: 100%. You have to be getting something out of the remote thing. It’s an interesting question. When people ask about remote, they assume that I’m a remote zealot. I’m not. I’m not someone who believes in remote as “this is the future.” I’m just not religious about the topic at all. What we needed out of remote very early on is we needed it as a talent hack, as a talent arbitrage. Hire the best people wherever they happen to be, figure everything out later, hire them quickly, get them in the ship as early as possible and start seeing results. How can I just hire the best people no matter where they are? If you’re not hiring, if you don’t find that your talent density is significantly greater than your contemporaries that are co-located in whatever city you happen to be in, then you’re not leveraging that arbitrage the right way. MATT: That’s a really good way to put it. How long do you think that talent arbitrage exists? Stripe famously now has remote as their new office engineering center? CLARK: Sure. MATT: How long before Google, Facebook, etcetera, the same people you’re competing with in New York, open into the distributed world? CLARK: That time is probably now. It just means you have to be more creative. Also, even if ten of the biggest tech companies in the world were out hiring, the talent supply is big enough for us all. MATT: Playing off on site versus off site, we have talked a lot about how you work in a distributed fashion. How and when do you bring people together? CLARK: We have a company all-hands on site, a global all-hands, called IRL, InVision in Real Life. MATT: Ha! I like that. CLARK: This year it was in Phoenix, Arizona. We took over an entire resort and that was an intense, amazing, high-energy experience that brought a lot into the work that we do, that we have done since. And the year before that — also really incredible — in Los Angeles. I definitely like the format of all of us together in one resort better than all of us split up between a few hotels. So all company, all hands, IRL. And then we have miniature IRL. So the product department has a product managers’ IRL, which I think was two weeks ago in New Jersey. And I think this week, if I’m not mistaken, is the all-designers’ IRL in Chicago. They pick a city that just makes sense. And I think there was CFT, the Customer Facing Team, was in Denver a couple of weeks ago. So departments have an IRL, the whole company has an IRL, and then individual teams can tap into budget to get together in person. MATT: If I joined InVision, how many weeks or days out of the year am I going to be at these IRLs? CLARK: My guess is probably three throughout the year. We also encourage folks to go to the InVision events that we have, the customer-facing events. Design + Drinks, we do panels, not a week goes by that there isn’t some sort of InVision customer event happening at some bar someplace in the world. MATT: That’s really cool. CLARK: And so we try to encourage some folks to get together that way. Again, this is personal, my personal principle behind this online universe is it’s called Cloud Culture — that’s what we call it — Cloud Culture versus the IRL stuff, when you’re in real life I prefer us not to be doing work. MATT: Interesting. CLARK: I prefer us to be connecting as people. If you gave me a week with the team together in person I would really like 80% of that to be stuff — it could be conversations that sound like work but conversations that really bring us closer together as people. My mental model here is that we have little scale models of ourselves. Even if we’re in person, we’re not really relating to the person we’re looking at, we’re relating to our little mental model of that person that rests in our mind. Does that make sense? MATT: Sure. CLARK: The more time that we spend together, the more articulate, the more detailed that mental model of you becomes. So when we’re online you get to a certain level of precision, [I can] take a long time to get to know you as a person and get to know how you behave and act in different contexts, how you react to certain things as individuals or as groups. When we get together, the fidelity of that model increases exponentially. And we take that mental model into the online environment. That’s the reason for the on-site, in-person experiences. MATT: I’ve heard — you talk about the screen a lot but I have also heard that InVision — rumor — that you’ve banned slide decks. CLARK: It makes a great headline, doesn’t it? [laughs] It’s not exactly true. What I’ll tell you is that we encourage visual collaborative communication in meetings more than prepared slides, only because that visual communication tends, number one, to be much more democratize-able. You can get more folks who are of a greater diversity of connection to the problem space. If you’re going to present something to a product team, that’s one kind of collaboration but arguably a lot of those product conversations should reach far beyond the engineering, product, or designers who work on it. You’d like to be able to engage business stakeholders, domain experts that exist within the business, or folks that are impactful. You’d like to have your Head of Finance on a product call and to have them totally track an influence. So staying visual, being sure that you just have a strong bias to visual communication, visual storytelling, getting visually-driven artifacts that are real to the customer, real and true to the customer experience, I think are really important. You generate better conversations than you would with a deck. It happens to be that we’re all trained when we see a deck. It’s like a movie, like “Now is our time to take out the popcorn, kick back and let someone else do the talking.” When you do a Freehand sketch — we have a product called Freehand, which is basically a gigantic, online white board — or you’re actually showing screens of an experience, and tying the conversation around pricing into the user experience, that drives that conversation around pricing to the customer — two things. Number one, you’re being super customer-centric, you’re orienting all of the people on the call around the front line of that problem space. Pricing is not a number conversation. Pricing has financial impact, pricing needs to be within financial guardrails, but ultimately pricing is not about a number, it’s about a customer experience. All of the leverage you have around pricing, all of the acceptance from the market that is required to make that price the right price — and now I’m spinning off into a pricing conversation, but you’ll understand how this is a microcosm for all these things — MATT: Totally. CLARK: — comes down to somebody looking at a screen at some point and feeling good or bad about it. So if you can have that pricing conversation through a lens of design — and by the way, this is what InVision principle number seven is meant to imply — being design-driven. How do we get into the mind and the heart of the customer and have the business conversation while we’re having the customer conversation? Design conversation and business strategy conversation, all in one. If you can do that, you can have a much greater diversity of people in the conversation, your Head of Finance doesn’t feel like they’re on a product call, the product people don’t feel like they’re in a finance call, everyone feels like they’re in a creative problem-solving call. MATT: I love it. Thanks again. CLARK: Pleasure. MATT: That was Clark Valberg. You can find him on Twitter at @clarkvalberg. That’s “Clark,” then “Valberg” — V-A-L-B-E-R-G.  We’ve got a special treat in store for the next episode. Back in September, Automattic held its annual Grand Meetup in Orlando. The Grand Meetup is a time for all Automatticians to get together in one place. We get to meet some of our colleagues face-to-face for the first time, hear some great talks from folks like Stephen Wolfram (who was a guest on this podcast a few weeks back), and of course hang out and have fun together too. We set up a recording booth at the meetup and talked to a bunch of folks from across the company to hear about their experiences with distributed work and the importance of in-person meetups for keeping people connected throughout the year. Thanks for joining us and see you next time.

Read more about Lydia X.Z. Brown in “Making Work Accessible, Wherever it Happens.” Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. Because of their background in working with disabled and marginalized people, attorney and activist Lydia X. Z. Brown has a deep understanding of how different workplace environments can best serve diverse workforces. Today they join our host Matt Mullenweg to discuss what distributed companies can do to make workflows and working conditions more inclusive. The full episode transcript is below. *** MATT MULLENWEG: Howdy howdy. Welcome to the Distributed podcast. I’m your host, Matt Mullenweg.  Today’s guest is Lydia X. Z. Brown, who is a… well, Lydia wears many, many hats — we’ll get to that in a minute. Lydia once gave a talk for Automattic about disability inclusion, and today we’re going to continue that conversation.  Lydia spent much of their life feeling left out, and they’ve dedicated their career to advocating for marginalized folks of all kinds. As the CEO of a distributed company, I’m curious to know more about how we can make the hundreds of Automatticians across the world more comfortable at work, and I know Lydia will have some insightful thoughts to share about that.   Okay. Let’s get started. MATT MULLENWEG: Hey Lydia. LYDIA X. Z. BROWN: Hi Matt. Thank you so much for having me on your podcast. MATT: You are a multi-hyphenate. It says here you’re a writer-advocate-organizer-strategist-educator-speaker and attorney. How did all those things come to be for you? LYDIA: I have believed from a very young age that every single one of us has a moral obligation to use whatever resources we have — time, money, knowledge, skills, emotional energy, access to physical resources — however that might be defined — that we each have a moral obligation to use those resources in service of justice, and fighting against injustice and oppression and violence in all of its forms, structural and individual, subtle and overt. And since the time I was young, in grade school up through high school and now as an adult, I have done that. And I have been enormously privileged in many ways, although I frequently talk about experiencing marginalization in others, I have an enormous amount of privilege and I have experienced some of that in terms of access to some resources. And for me that makes the journey quite natural and quite intuitive. It wasn’t so much that I chose “I’m going to be this thing, I’m going to be an advocate, I’m going to be an educator,” so much as I have to. I have an obligation to, and I have the skills necessary to develop, so that I can be successful in doing it. MATT: There is so much injustice in the world. How did you pick the areas that you focus on? LYDIA: The work that I do is deeply personal to me. I am a multiply-disabled person. Most people who know about my work primarily know me from the autistic community. And not only am I autistic but I also live with psychosocial disabilities and other cognitive disabilities. And not only do I move through the world as a disabled, neurodivergent person, but I also move through the world as a queer person and as an openly non-binary trans person, and as an East Asian person of color living in the U.S. And all of those experiences of marginalization, and what some of us might say is hyper-marginalization, people who live at the margins of the margins where there is so much that is stacked against us, and how society is designed, and who society assumes is normal and healthy and the ideal, and who society decides shouldn’t really be at the center, shouldn’t be in the lead, should be denied opportunities, should not have access and all of those things, it gives you a very different perspective than when you grow up in the world with access to more privilege and resources in ways that I didn’t, even in the many ways that I have had some privileges. And for me, going through school, targeted all the time as a freak — that was one of the most common refrains of my grade school and middle school bullies — and making it to high school, where I was falsely accused of planning a school shooting because of stereotypes and stigma about people like me. MATT: Oh wow. LYDIA: And then making it through college and law school, where you would think that people might have a more egalitarian approach. Well, that’s laughable because sometimes the people that are in what are supposed to be the most progressive kind of spaces — forward-thinking, innovative — sometimes were the most damaging and the most harmful precisely because they already believed that they were incapable of inflicting such harm. And moving through those spaces, constantly receiving the message that I didn’t belong, and at the same time that I couldn’t speak for or alongside or even in support of other hyper-marginalized communities, because, well you do have this privilege — it gives you a fire. MATT: How do you develop empathy for someone whose lived experience is different from your own? LYDIA: For me it starts with recognizing firstly our shared humanity and secondly believing deeply in and being passionate about a commitment to valuing all people and all configurations of people’s lives and experiences, and how their bodies and minds work, whether they are like mine or unlike mine. And if we all start at that premise, that every single human is valuable for who they are in all of their complexities, in their many identities and experiences, not in spite of them, because we are not the same and that’s a good and okay thing, but as all of the things that they are, then we can recognize that even if we don’t understand intellectually or emotionally what another person’s experience is, it doesn’t mean that it’s not valuable or that they’re not valuable as a person, or that that experience or part of their identity somehow detracts from their personhood. MATT: Can you tell us a little bit about what you’re working on today? LYDIA: Right now I’ve been working on developing a project called The Fund for Community Reparations for Autistic People of Color’s Interdependence, Survival and Empowerment. We call it the Autistic People of Color Fund for short. I launched the fund last summer, 2018, using some award money that I had received from a disability rights organization, as well as the proceeds of “All the Weight of Our Dreams,” the anthology that I edited, along with two other folks — Morénike Giwa Onaiwu and E. Ashkenazy — featuring 61 writers and artists of color who are all autistic. And we used those proceeds and that award money to seed a fund that provides micro-grants to individual autistic people of color as a form of direct support and mutual aid. The fund so far has given out over $12,000 in funds in grants of between $50 to $500 each to people from a variety of countries, as young as toddlers and as old as our elders, to help them with everything from accessing mental healthcare to covering a shortage in rent money, to escaping an abusive situation, to buying textbooks for school or art supplies or posters for a protest, and everything in between. And that project, every several months is reinvigorated with donations from our community because we’re always running low on funds. So something that I’m working on today and this week is hoping to gain more sustainable and long-term sources of funding for the fund because right now we are in a place where the vast majority of our donations are small gifts from individual community members, many of whom are low-income or no-income, who are disproportionately unemployed or underemployed or have only precarious access to financial stability rather than having general access. Every time I open my inbox, there’s anywhere from five to 25 emails from people who are seeking to apply for money through the fund. And we never have enough money to meet the need because our community is facing so much. And when you are negatively racialized and autistic — and most of the applicants to the fund have many other experiences of marginalization on top of that — the likelihood that you’re facing circumstances that are far beyond your control in terms of access to healthcare, access to safe, affordable and accessible housing, or simply being able to live and enjoy your life, go on vacation, see a movie is just so difficult and so hard to grasp. And that’s something that I’m hoping we can begin to change. I know we already have with what we’ve done but it’s also not enough. MATT: If people listening wanted to support this organization, where could they go to donate? LYDIA: You can donate funds to the Autistic People of Color Fund by sending a check, money order, or PayPal payment to the Autistic Women and Non-Binary Network, AWN. If you donate to AWN, you’ll need to include a note that it goes to the Autistic People of Color Fund and they’ll include it in our budget. MATT: Great, thank you. What’s your current work environment like? LYDIA: My current work environment is in a traditional office location in downtown Washington, D.C. As an attorney, I work as a fellow for the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. In our offices there are 12 floors, there’s different law firms and organizations, legal and non-legal, who all share the same building. And in our office space, Bazelon is the primary leaseholder for this very large office suite. We have seven staff currently here and we also have three other organizations, one law firm, and two nonprofit organizations that sublet space from us. So we all share this large office suite together in D.C. I’m sitting in an office right now where I have a very nice lamp that I got to replace the horrible fluorescent lights, I have a door that shuts and it’s wonderful because when I need alone time I can shut the door and when I need social time I can walk outside the door and say “Hello, my fellow workers, we all exist here, who would like coffee?” MATT: Tell me about how traditional co-located office experiences are like for different kinds of disabled people. LYDIA: For some disabled people, having a traditional co-located office space is a boon. It’s a boon to mental health because it enables and provides and a built-in way to connect with and share space with other humans. People were built to be in community, that is how we evolved, evolutionarily speaking, if we want to go to basic biology. And that’s true even for those of us like me who are more introverted. People were built to be in community. And if we don’t have access to other people in our daily experiences and throughout our lifetimes we can end up living lives of enforced isolation, and that can be especially true for many disabled people, whether it’s someone who is physically disabled or whether it’s somebody who has mental disabilities or both. Having access to a workplace where we can actually see other people, potentially have the opportunity to build social and professional networks, can be great for that reason. It can also be helpful in that if the workplace itself offers features of the building design and of the space design itself, the office layout, that maximizes access for a particular employee, it can make workflows occur better. It can make it more efficient, it can make it more easy to complete. It can enable the employee ultimately to feel better about the work that they are doing and to produce higher-quality work. So there are a lot of potential benefits to having this type of office location. There are also, of course, downsides. And of course there are many potential configurations to these kinds of offices in the first place. So here where I am, for the most part, we each have separate offices with separate doors. And for some folks like me that works great. Like I said, it enables me both to have privacy and to be able to work alone when I need to be alone and focus, but it also enables me to connect with others by choosing when to keep my door open and shut and choosing when to move in and out of this office space that was designated for me. Other people who are in a co-located office location may prefer to have more of an open-office layout where there are multiple desks or workspaces that are not really separated or only have partial walls or partial dividers. It enables that same kind of ratio of having a bit of a dedicated workspace for you but also supports and enables more open conversation and collaboration with people who are physically present with you. Or to give what my partner Shain will often talk about as having a kind of ambient people existing where we’re all existing in the same space and that’s comforting in a way but it’s also not creating an obligation or a necessity to have to engage in conversation if that would be distracting or unhelpful to your workflow. MATT: How should people think about physical disabilities versus neuro–atypical folks in regards to office environments? LYDIA: Everyone is different, whether you are neurodivergent or physically disabled or both. And many people are both, all the time. Your needs are never going to be the same as anyone else’s, just like people who are not disabled. There are no two people who function best in the exact same type of environment. Where disability comes into the picture is thinking about how someone’s body or mind might function best in an environment, a built environment or an emotional or communicative environment or infrastructure that perhaps wasn’t designed to begin with with that particular person’s bodily capacity or neurodivergence in mind when that design was first conceptualized and then implemented. So when people ask me how do we then design a workplace that best fits people with physical disabilities versus best fits neurodivergent people, my response is [that] there is no one size fits all. So for example, in the autistic community, there are some autistic people who I know who need to have daily access to natural sunlight, and quite a lot of it, in order to function well. And if the room is closed off and there’s no windows or there’s very few of them, and it’s only artificial lighting, that can make it incredibly difficult to function, let alone to get work done. And at the same time, I know many other autistic people for whom the sunlight is actually physically extremely painful and being around sunlight is emotionally draining, it is sensory overstimulating, and it physically just hurts. Obviously those two needs are by definition incompatible. Those two people, one from each of those groups, cannot share a workspace in the same room because either one of them is very well supported and is functioning very well with that type of lighting, whichever one is there, and the other one is miserable and/or in pain. For me the question isn’t so much, “How do we design a workplace or one methodology of supporting employees in terms of infrastructure,” as it is “How do we make sure that each person that is involved with our company or our organization or our community is able to access the type of environment and space that works best for them.” MATT: A lot of people listening here will be at or running fully–distributed companies where there is not a physical co-location place. What should people in those environments keep in mind when designing how they interact with their colleagues? LYDIA: For the people who need to function best having more constant communication, having access to other people around them who are working or certain forms of scaffolded support from their manager, it can be hard to do that in a distributed way. So, for example, with some people who have ADD or depression, it can be very difficult to manage one’s own workflow, which some people might say, “Well that’s a prerequisite. If you want to work for a company that has a distributed workforce, you need to be able to self-manage your time, you need to be able to self-manage your workflow prioritization, you need to be able to self-manage how you initiate tasks and follow through on tasks and insure completion. And if you can’t do that, maybe this isn’t the right workplace for you.” And my response to that would be perhaps for some people that may be true, there may be some people who already know about themselves from their own experience that that’s not going to work for them, so those people are probably not in your workforce if that’s where you are. They might be and if they are I sincerely and genuinely hope for their sake that they are able to find an opportunity that they are excited about that will support them in excelling in an environment that they would need for them. But for people who aren’t at that point where it’s actually an impossibility and completely inaccessible but who would struggle with the lack of formal and physical access to structure that would traditionally come with a co-located office, my suggestions would be to always go to the employee first. If you believe that someone might be struggling with their workflow management, or they’re struggling just in general with their job, or they have already told you, “I’m really excited about this, this has been going great, however I’m beginning to have some issues and I want to make sure we intervene before those issues worsen and affect my work and affect my performance on this team,” it’s for you to ask them, “What things work well for you, what things don’t, and how can I support you in getting the things that work well?” So, for example, if someone in a distributed company says that they need to be able to be around other people at least during part of the day to get work done, but all your employees are in different locations, then it might be worthwhile for that company to invest in paying the membership of a co-working space for that employee so that they have access to a location that has some of the features of an office — it’s a workspace, people are primarily there to do work, there might be some desks and a printer, so it can feel more like a workspace than your home or a cafe might — but it also enables that person to stay where they are and doesn’t require the company to make that investment in horrifically expensive real estate, and for a workforce that is primarily not in one location and in fact may have, at most, perhaps five employees in one location, and they don’t want to share a space together. For somebody else it may be not so much, “I need a physical space,” but “I need to be able to have regular access to my manager, to be able to have conversations throughout the day.” In a distributed work environment, it’s not that that’s not possible, you of course already know that’s very possible, but it may be working with that employee to figure out [if] Slack work[s] for [them]. And if it’s not working for you, if it’s not meeting your need to be able to pop in and ask your manager questions throughout the day, then what are the other possible interfaces for communication modality that might meet that need instead? MATT: It seems like this could require a big degree of self-awareness. How do people find out if they need certain environments like you describe? LYDIA: Some people are able to figure it out better than others. And you’re definitely right that to be able to express and articulate what you need and what works well for you often requires a level of self-awareness that unfortunately not everybody has. But this is where good management and good team-building comes in. An effective manager in a distributed work environment needs to develop the skill of asking precise and information-gathering questions to elicit this kind of information. Because even if the employee might not be able to produce this information on their own, or might know it, but not necessarily know how to communicate it in a way that would be applicable and useful in a work environment, an effective manager or an effective supervisor should be able to develop the skill of asking, “Okay, so in your last work environment, let’s talk about the setup of your office.” Like you asked me, “Was this a good setup for you or not? What were things that you liked about it, what were things that you didn’t like about it? What was frustrating for you? What excited you when you came to work? Can you describe a time when you were really productive? What changes, if any, were made at any point during your time during this other work environment?” Or if they haven’t had a work experience, perhaps when they were in school or perhaps in some group that they volunteered with or they were part of in their community, whether it was their softball team or whether it was crochet, whatever it might be. It’s taking some of the kinds of questions that we might ask someone either in an assessment or an evaluation and/or in a job interview, but asking them with an eye to detail, being open-ended but also narrowly defined enough to capture the kind of information that will help the supervisor, the manager, and any HR support staff in figuring out how to then apply that information into the person’s current workplace. MATT: How common is it for people to be neurodivergent but not realize it themselves? LYDIA: I don’t have statistics on that and part of the reason I don’t is because by definition it would be incredibly difficult to capture a number or a percentage of how many people are objectively determined to likely be some type of neurodivergent versus how many people know that about themselves. But what I can tell you, based on anecdote and experience in working with thousands of different neurodivergent people over the last decade, is that it’s very common for people to know that they learn in a different way than others, whether that’s in a way that got them labeled stupid or in a way that got them labeled gifted. And it’s also very common for people to have received some type of label of disability or giftedness, or both, even if that specific label might turn out to be inaccurate, but it captured some aspect of their neurodivergence that somebody observed that this person didn’t fit into the mold of what society assumes is typical of how to learn and communicate and process and deal with emotion and all of those things that make our messy stuff in our brains. There are folks that discovered they were neurodivergent when they were in their teens, whether or not they had language for it. And there are also people who didn’t realize it until their forties, fifties, sixties, and even seventies. I’ve met some people in their seventies and eighties who figured it out at that late stage in their life. And it tells you a lot about us as a society of how we simultaneously assume that you don’t really count as disabled or neurodivergent if it’s not affecting you in a way that we treat you horribly over. “Well you must have functioned fine.” They probably didn’t, they were just very good at trying to hide it when they weren’t. Or that we say we knew about it so we labeled you all kinds of derogatory and terrible things, we recommended you for institutionalization, we assumed that you would never be able to make your own decisions, never be able to choose and form your own relationships, anything like that. And either way, neurodivergent and other disabled people will find ourselves in the double bind of being expected to overcome and mask being disabled for the comfort and convenience of non-disabled people or of being assumed that we will never amount to anything by any definition, that we are completely incompetent, that we are incapable, that we don’t belong and that we shouldn’t belong. And it’s always one or the other. But really they boil down to the same kind of ableism and that ableism is the devaluing of disabled people’s experience, that to live life as a disabled person of any kind means that we’re living a lesser life. But the reality is, is that disabled people have so much to offer ourselves, our own communities and the entire rest of the world because we have lived our entire lives learning how to function and survive and sometimes, when we’re lucky, to thrive in a world that was literally designed not for us. MATT: I have heard of workplaces that actually target and try to hire disabled people. What are some of the superpowers that those companies might be trying to benefit from that people might not appreciate? LYDIA: You know, it’s really interesting every time we talk about disability-targeted hiring initiatives for me because there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, many of us appreciate that there are companies out there that are trying to seek out more of us to hire us, recognizing that we actually do have talents and capacities individually and perhaps to some extent there may be some patterns of some talents among some people, at least sometimes. And that’s great, especially given the astronomical rates of un- and underemployment for disabled people, especially those of psychosocial, intellectual, and developmental disabilities. But at the same time something that really worries me in many conversations around employment and corporate hiring initiatives are that many hiring managers creating these programs will say things like “We love having disabled employees because they’re so motivated, they show up to work every single day, they never call out sick, we can depend on them, they’ll be loyal to our company forever.” And you know, at the surface level, when you don’t really think about that too deeply that sounds great. Like, yeah, that means that disabled employees tend to be really dedicated, we should hire more disabled people. But what that says to me is actually that because of our astronomical rates of un- and underemployment, we have become sometimes an exploited labor force. Where there are some companies that mean well, they’re not necessarily doing this out of malice, but they are aware at least on some subconscious level that it’s more risky for many disabled employees to call out more. That it’s more risky for us to do anything but excel far above and beyond what our non-disabled peers need to do in order to make sure that [we] keep [our] jobs. And that makes me really sad and it makes me really angry. Because I don’t think we should be hiring disabled either because of stereotypes that might or might not be true, e.g., that all autistic people are savants at math or that all blind people are prodigies at music, when sure, some are. There are some autistic people I know who are math geniuses and there are some blind people I know who are incredible musicians and there’s also plenty of us that aren’t. Like, I’m autistic and I suck at math. Also I’m Asian so I just broke two stereotypes at once, which is fun. [laughter] We all have different skill sets and they may or may not be tied at all to our disability but we should be hiring people based on whether that person is going to be able to do the job and do it well, disabled or not. And we should be hiring people because we want them and we believe that they belong in our workplace, we want to support them in being part of that workplace, and as being more than a person who simply does a job but as someone who belongs to the community of people in this workplace. That’s what we want to do. And so if the question is, “What are superpowers that we bring?” My answer is, how about we not talk about superpowers but we talk about why each and every single one of us deserves to be able to do work in a way that’s meaningful, that makes sense, that makes us feel good, that is not doing something horribly unethical, hopefully, and that at the end of the day enables us to be able to live in a system that unfortunately isn’t really set up for most of us to thrive? MATT: Let’s talk about why — why people deserve to have that. LYDIA: I believe very firmly that every single person deserves to be able to live in a safe community and to be able to live a self-determined life and to be able to live authentically and true to themselves and to be able to live as part of a community where they can receive care, they can receive support, they can receive love, and they can feel a sense of belonging. And I believe that that is inherent to human dignity. It should never have to be earned. Somebody should not have to earn the right to live without fear of violence. Someone shouldn’t have to earn the right to be able to afford safe and accessible housing. Nobody should have to earn the right to be able to receive healthcare. And unfortunately in the society that we live in our society presumes that those are things that need to be earned and that if we don’t think someone is contributing enough or we don’t think that they are productive enough, that maybe they don’t really deserve those things. And if we’re nice, maybe we’ll give it to them, at least a little bit or at least for part of the time, but until and if and when society says, “Oh, you’re pulling your own weight, we think it’s contingent and we think it’s conditional.” And that to me is incredibly inhumane and unjust. MATT: As a wrap–up, was there anything we missed that you wanted to talk about?  LYDIA: I just think it’s important to note that when we’re talking about employment and disability, I believe that the corporate sector has an opportunity to take leadership in fighting for fair and living pay for people with disabilities. Many people don’t know that it is still 100% legal in the United States and in many other countries around the world to pay people with disabilities pennies on the hour or the equivalent. MATT: Really? LYDIA: In the U.S. it’s emblazoned into federal law, in section 14(c) of the 1938 Fair Labor & Standards Act. Section 14(c) is still on the books today and there are many for-profit and not-for-profit organizations that take advantage of section 14(c) to pay disabled people as low as cents per hour for menial labor and it’s 100 percent legal. And this is horrific. There is a bill before the Congress right now called the Raise the Wage Act, which, if passed, would eliminate the use of what’s called sub-minimum wage in the U.S. And that’s pretty awful that such a concept exists. If it’s minimum, there is supposed to be nothing below it. But in the U.S. we call it sub-minimum wage. There are other nations in which there are no labor protections at all for people with disabilities, either in terms of non-discrimination or wage protections. And while I’m not an expert on international labor law, what I do know is that companies around the world, all of the folks that are listening here, have an opportunity not only to prioritize and speak publicly on ensuring that you’re paying folks a living wage and a fair wage that is not based upon backward notions of productivity, but also to fight for the end of sub-minimum wage and other unfair labor practices that devalue disabled people’s work even more. MATT: If people want to follow you more, where can they find you online? LYDIA: You can find me on Facebook under the name Lydia X. Z. Brown — Autistic Hoya. And you can also find me on Twitter @autistichoya. All one word. My home page is autistichoya.net. And my blog is autistichoya.com. That should really be reversed but that would require a type of web engineering that I am not capable of doing alone. [laughter] MATT: Well I’m also very honored that you use WordPress for many if not all of your websites. LYDIA: I use WordPress for almost all of my websites and I love it. MATT: Awesome, I very much appreciate that. Finally I will mention as well what you said earlier. Autismandrace.com, which is where they can donate to the project and fund that you mentioned earlier. And there are some instructions on that website for how to do so. MATT: That was Lydia X. Z. Brown. You can find them on Twitter at @autistichoya. That’s @ “Autistic” and then “Hoya,” H-O-Y-A. You can also find Lydia blogging at AutisticHoya.com.  It’s really important for folks who run distributed teams to remember that employees don’t fall into binaries of “normal” or “abnormal.” We all find ourselves in different spots on different spectrums of ability throughout our careers, and hopefully, with more flexibility around workspaces, work hours, or work styles, we can all feel included and productive no matter what professional setting we’re in.  On the next episode of the Distributed podcast, I’ll be speaking with Clark Valberg, the CEO of InVision, which is a very popular cloud-based design platform that many distributed teams, including Automattic, have adopted. InVision started out as an agency, but after they built this internal tool for their designers, they realized that it was big enough to be a flagship product. InVision is similar in size to Automattic, so I’m interested to hear about Clark’s distributed journey.  Thanks for joining, and see you next time.

Read more about Taso Du Val in “Inside Toptal’s Distributed Screening Process.” Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. When hiring managers interview a candidate for a high-level role, they want to be sure that the person they choose will be productive and able to work well with their prospective team. But what if the hiring process takes place over video chat? A growing number of companies outsource the vetting process to a company like Toptal, a freelance marketplace. Toptal’s CEO Taso Du Val joins us on this episode of the Distributed podcast, with Matt Mullenweg.  The full episode transcript is below. *** MATT MULLENWEG: Howdy. My name is Matt Mullenweg, and I run a company called Automattic, with over 950 employees distributed across over 70 countries. We’re growing quickly, so I spend a lot of time thinking about how the company is going to find the very best people. Since our team leads might never meet a far-flung applicant face to face until well after they’ve been hired, our hiring process has to be comprehensive, so sometimes it can be a little bit of a slow and long process. But what if you need to hire top talent quickly? What if you need a world-class project manager on a short-term basis, and you don’t have time to rigorously vet a bunch of applicants or set them up on a payroll platform?  Well, you might turn to Toptal, a freelance marketplace that aims to provide companies with a fully-vetted pool of talent that represents the top 3 percent of their network’s applicants. Toptal’s CEO, Taso Du Val, joins me today to talk about how he built his company, which happens to be distributed all over the world, and about how current approaches to recruitment are undergoing a major sea change. Let’s get started.  MATT: All right, we are here today on the latest episode of Distributed with Matt Mullenweg, and we have CEO and Founder of Toptal, Taso Du Val. Welcome very much. TASO DU VAL: Thank you, Matt, for having me. MATT: Just for listeners who might not know what Toptal — do you mind explaining your journey to Toptal and then you can introduce what Toptal is? TASO: I was doing some consulting work and working with some companies doing contract software development, and at the time I was mentioning to them that they should use some other resources to be able to get software developers. I mentioned the freelance marketplaces on the internet. And so many times they said to me, “Those are terrible places. You can never find good resources there.”  Meanwhile, I was having a great experience finding great resources there. So I said “Hmm, this is fascinating, I keep hearing time and time again that people are having terrible experiences finding top talent, yet I’m having a very consistent experience finding top talent. What is the difference?” And the difference really came down to my domain expertise, being able to identify and screen that top talent. And that was really the genesis for what Toptal is today. MATT: And your background, like myself, is engineering. TASO: Precisely. MATT: And in fact, we met at — was it a MySQL open source conference 14 years ago, or something? TASO: Yes, in 2007, 2008, after the first MySQL camp at Google. So that was a really long time ago.  MATT: So Toptal is, if you were to summarize it, a site I can go and say, “Hey, I want X, Y, Z?” TASO: Mhm. MATT: You cover a few areas now — developers, designers…? TASO: Project managers, product managers, and finance experts. We just launched recently project managers and product managers, and that has been phenomenally successful. So I would say the demand and the experience that people are having with product and project managers far surpassed what we thought it would by a long shot. So it’s been really cool to see a management type of role take place remotely and be so successful.  With developers, they have a long history of working remotely, even designers, and that is in part because individual contributors can contribute more rigorously to a project. You have, in the case of software development where you can commit code, in the design world now lots of tools are evolving to be something similar. MATT: InVision, Figma, and things like that. TASO: Precisely. So if you look at it from that perspective, it’s very conducive to the remote working process. When it comes to management, it’s still a little bit new, of course not for us internally, and for many distributed companies, but for outside consumers it’s a little bit more new. They’ve been very receptive to it, and it has worked really, really well, more so than we anticipated. MATT: So if I’ve got a job to be done, I can go to Toptal. I hire someone, and I can now hire someone to come into an office, or is it all through the platform? TASO: We do some on-site work. Generally what we do is 95% remote. And so when a client or someone wants someone on site for a certain period of time, we allow for that, however we are not generally the conduit for facilitating on-site work. MATT: The advantage of going through you all versus just finding freelancers, is you ensure the quality of the talent? TASO: Mhm. MATT: And you have tools to mediate the experience, right? I don’t need to worry about how they’re getting paid, I could just pay you and you take care of it all? TASO: Precisely. And I would say the biggest value-add is the time it takes to acquire the talent and the energy it takes to screen the talent. We have done all of that for you. And so — no kidding, this is a real stat — our send-to-hire ratio is about 1:1.5. For every 1.5 “candidates” that we send you, you will hire one of them. MATT: Oh wow. TASO: We aren’t a recruiting shop, we aren’t a typical staffing company whereby we send you ten resumes and you say “Okay, I want to screen and talk to all these folks.” We generally send you one. And the reason that we are able to do that is because we actually have a lot of process and domain expertise internally to be able to vet those talents, whether it’s in finance or software development, to ensure that that person, before we send them to you, is the perfect match. So it’s about getting information from you up front in a more modern way than a staffing or recruitment company generally does it, and then facilitating the matching process through software and processes that are reinforced through software.  MATT: Let’s do some level setting around the company. I know you’re private. TASO: Yes. MATT: But to whatever extent you can talk publicly about how many people is it, how many people are on the platform? If you can talk about revenue at all…? Just to give the listeners an idea. TASO: In terms of a core team we are approximately 500 full time internal folks. Those folks work on software development for our platform, for the website, for different technologies that help facilitate the screening and matching processes, and so on and so forth. And then we have other folks who work in operations, marketing, and so forth. So that team is about 500, let’s say. MATT: Were you distributed from the start? TASO: Yes, we were distributed from the start. I started the company on a handshake and then contracting out a software developer to a company almost without a website. So that is really how the company started. And I was in Palo Alto at the time. The individual who was contracted out — actually, we pretty much had two — were in Argentina and South Africa. And I was actually going to an office that my roommate’s family’s friend allowed me to have as a way to go to work everyday.  However, the point was rather moot. I was going into an office but not seeing anyone or interacting with anyone except myself. So it almost was this zombie-like walk to the office every morning where I’m going to the office because I go to work, but I don’t see anyone who I work with. [laughs] And so I actually started waking up and just working on my computer at home.  And then I said to myself, “Well why am I even working from home? I should just go somewhere else because I’ve never really traveled!” So I ended up going to Europe and all sorts of different places. And that’s what took me on my remote journey, so to speak. MATT: So, FotoLog and Slide, places you were before, did those have distributed teams or were they mostly co-located? TASO: Those were in-office companies. I went into the office pretty much everyday. The remote working nature was there, but it was very light. MATT: So 500 people. I know a couple years ago you said it was over $100 million revenue, so I imagine it’s beyond that. TASO: Yes, and this year we are likely to be in the nine figures in net revenue, which is a really big accomplishment for the company. MATT: Congratulations, that’s huge. TASO: Thank you, yes. MATT: Again I think it’s good to set this up because not that many people know about Toptal yet.  TASO: [laughs] Well said. MATT: And after this podcast, at least dozens more will. TASO: A few dozen, a few dozen. MATT: One of the worries people have about building distributed companies and distributed work is this hiring aspect. How does that work for you all? How do people find you? How do you screen them? What can you tell us about that process? TASO: A lot of people find us through our brand. Freelancers find us in different countries as we are generally the best source for them to get good jobs remotely, especially within the United States and with Fortune 500-type companies, companies that are doing more serious engineering work and are longer-term engagements.  So our reputation has permeated in those types of environments on the talent side. On the client side, I would say it’s similar. Now, of course we do marketing, however, we do often have referrals, and word of mouth is a strong way that we get a fair amount of business. So those are, on both sides, really how people know about us, generally speaking. MATT: How many applications do you all get? TASO: Oh my gosh. Here’s an interesting stat actually. At this point in time, I believe, and I’d have to double-check this, it’s over a million a year. MATT: Wow. TASO: And to put that in perspective, Google as a company gets approximately 1.2 million applications a year as a company.  MATT: Wow. TASO: So if you look at it from that perspective it’s actually a pretty sizeable volume. It is a little bit apples and oranges because all we do is screen talent, that’s it.  MATT: But it probably speaks to how much global talent there is looking for remote opportunities, which is one of the big advantages of being in a distributed company. TASO: It does. And that is kind of the miracle of it, I suppose. While we are doing a million applications a year, I think that absolutely pales in comparison to what’s out there and what we could do if we put even more effort behind it. My assertion, if we went pedal to the metal and we started doing a lot more advertising, we actually worked to amplify it, I think we could get easily four to five million applications a year globally. If you think about —   MATT: Wow. I can’t imagine that applicant tracking system. TASO: [laughs] Well we built our own because all the other ones were certainly not sufficient. If you think about it from that perspective, that not only highlights the amount of people that are talented all over the world but it also highlights the amount of people that want to work remotely that are not today. And so the far majority of our applications want to work remotely, meaning they are not working remotely today but they are applying because they see it as a huge, life changing opportunity for them. And so it’s really interesting to see the dichotomy between what is today versus what we’re seeing people want tomorrow to look like.  MATT: So I’m an engineer somewhere, I want more flexibility, I go on Toptal. Let’s say my resume makes it through. How do you determine whether I’m top two, three percent or not? TASO: Well it’s a subjective process, and so I can’t state it’s perfect, but we err on the side of conservatism so that we have a near-guaranteed great experience for our clients, in a similar sense that McKinsey does or that some other top-tier firms that offer top talent, so to speak. The real high-level deals are that you go through what is in effect an interview process. MATT: Like you’re going to be hired? TASO: Like you’re going to be hired at a Google or a McKinsey or a company like this, depending on the vertical. MATT: How important are their technical skills versus their people or soft skills? TASO: They are both incredibly important to us. So we have looked at, for example, how McKinsey screens people. And we have actually taken some of those processe and refined them and introduced them into our screening processes. Same with Google, same with some other companies that are keen on hiring good cultural fits. I wouldn’t say in terms of our own network there is a unified culture, but there are certainly elements that unify people in terms of soft skills.  They have high integrity, they have punctuality. No kidding — something we screen rigorously for. They have good judgment, which we are able to screen for in different areas. So if you think about elements like that, you can actually screen well beyond hard skills. Do you know how to write an algorithm in constant time versus quadratic time, or something of the nature like this, which is still a very important skill to have. But I would actually say the soft skills are, especially when working remotely, more important. MATT: So even if I’m a brilliant engineer, if I show up late to your interview, it’s going to be a mark against me and you might not hire me if I don’t have those good soft skills? TASO: Oh 100%. The punctuality component is very, very real. So if you show up just a little late you will literally be rejected automatically.  MATT: Wow. TASO: And people get pissed on this point. They’re like “Hey, I was on another call, I went through the—” Hey, look, that’s our integrity on the line. If McKinsey and the best companies have survived by upping the bar in terms of integrity, we’re going to do the same. MATT: I was going to ask how you test for integrity, and punctuality is an interesting window into that. TASO: Yes. MATT: What are some other things that you feel like are really important to the Toptal culture? TASO: One element that I can speak to is the character of the person. As many people know, great engineers can be very abrasive. And I would say there was a point in my life, if not still in many cases, I can be abrasive. But if you go into an interview process and you understand it’s professional, you have to show your best self. And if you are abrasive when you’re showing your best self, it doesn’t go uphill from there. Right? [laughs] It kind of goes downhill.  So you have to be very judgmental on those factors because if they are introduced to a client that then experiences Toptal as a group of abrasive but brilliant people, that’s not going to resonate with them very well. So you have to take elements like that, that are a little bit more subjective, a little bit more nuanced, and factor them into the equation, because it’s not just about whether you can write algorithms or not. MATT: Like all distributed workforces, like your own, for a lot of people English is not their first language. TASO: Correct. MATT: So are there resources you point to or anything or is that something people need to learn on their own? TASO: Internally at Toptal, we have provided English lessons before. We don’t anymore. But it’s generally something, both in our core and externally in our network, that we expect people to know coming into Toptal, whether that’s through our network or through the core team. MATT: I actually was pitching this to Austin from Lambda School. Part of what they’re doing is taking people who don’t know how to code and teaching them to code. TASO: Sure. MATT: I think there’s a huge opportunity in that there are probably millions of great engineers who are great coders and don’t know English well. TASO: I would say that’s the case. MATT: So versus teaching someone how to code, teach them English. I don’t know which is harder, to be honest. They’re both learning a language, just an artificial versus natural language. TASO: We have thought of putting people through different re-skilling programs. However, I’ve never thought about it as well — if you already know blockchain but you speak Chinese, can we just teach you English and will you be able to work with people internationally? MATT: How do you decide if who you’re hiring goes to the Toptal internal team versus clients? TASO: It’s very separated. It’s very separated so that we have clear client expectations and KPIs and we have clear internal KPIs in processes. You would think we would mix them, that we would leverage the incredible technology that we’ve built for our network, but it wasn’t so easy to compartmentalize.  MATT: So Toptal itself is not a client on Toptal? TASO: We are in some instances but we are not using it to the extent that people would think we would use it.  MATT: When you say KPIs, what are the differences? TASO: We are looking at time to hire, time to fill, so on and so forth. So we would have to disable all these components. In regards to how we do our screening we have capacity, metrics and triggers that exist in there to help manage the pipelines. It’s a really big system, rightfully so, for Toptal the network. Internally it’s a little bit difficult to decouple from the purpose that it has already been constructed to serve. MATT: Let’s zoom into the virtual wall. TASO: Sure, sure. MATT: Tell me a bit about how the company is set up. Who are your direct reports, how is your hierarchy and what’s your structure? How should people think about Toptal? TASO: Let’s kick it off with how the company operates. I think that’s a good window into how we work and gives you some good insights into how structured we are, how we set goals, how we actually work day-to-day. We have an OKR method that we use, like many companies, to set objectives quarterly, annually, so on and so forth, and we are very rigorous about it. We are very methodical about it. MATT: As CEO you have some OKRs and those..? TASO: I do, yeah. MATT: What are some off-the-shelf tools you use? TASO: Slack, Zoom. In terms of product management we use Jira. What I find really interesting is Confluence. I find Confluence very interesting. MATT: That’s their internal blogging thing, right? TASO: It’s actually more like a Wikipedia slash —  MATT: Yes, like document management plus some internal —  what I would call blogging, but you can use it instead of email, right? TASO: Right. It’s still a little bit cumbersome, still a little bit big in some instances, but it is a really good tool. MATT: I know Atlassian runs on it religiously. TASO: Yes. MATT: They say it’s their secret weapon, it’s the thing that makes everything work. TASO: We’ve started to go down that path actually for knowledge management, and for documenting processes, and for other elements that are important for the company to be unified on.  MATT: So those are some off the shelf ones. Any others that come to mind? Google Apps, Office 365? TASO: Yes, Google Apps. Yes, I would highly recommend it. [laughs] MATT: Yes, it’s pretty good. They did a good job there. Who’s on your exec team? How did you meet? TASO: Sure. So our executive team is pretty traditional. It depends if you’re looking at a more traditional company or an internet company. We have a fair amount more executives that report directly to me. That’s a personal choice. MATT: So is it flat at the top? TASO: I have about 12 direct reports. And from what I’ve seen via conversations and from what other companies are doing, that tends to be on the larger side of things. I have seen companies with 20 and I think we even had 20 at one point, not realizing how bloated that was. And so we —  MATT: So what reports directly into you? Is there a CTO, HR? TASO: CTO, CAO, we have a chief administrative officer, that person is really working to refine all the processes, the data analytics, business insights. A VP of people, a VP of brand marketing, a VP of growth marketing, a VP of design, a VP of comms, a VP of finance and probably two others that I’m missing. MATT: How do you all get together? Where are those people located? TASO: Well our VP of finance is in Pennsylvania. Our general counsel is in Massachusetts. Our VP of product is in Greece. MATT: So these people are all over the world. TASO: They are all over the world. MATT:  And do you meet weekly, every other week? TASO: We meet biweekly, so every two weeks we have meetings. And that is the cadence at which we meet. We also have an all-hands that’s monthly. And so that gives you insight into how often our all-hands occur with our company. MATT: We do a similar thing where once a month we do — we call it a Town Hall. Typically the questions come in via text but everyone is on video now. We can all be on Zoom. You can get hundreds of people on Zoom pretty easy now and it’s — so sometimes they come in real time. I really like it. I also enjoy not knowing what’s coming next. We don’t pre-moderate or pre-screen the questions or anything. It’s just whatever pops up at the time. Everyone sees the question being asked. It’s not like I can skip them if I don’t like it. And sometimes the conversations are difficult, sometimes the answer is “I don’t know” or “Maybe we made a mistake,” or things like that. TASO: Right. We used to do it via text. Now we’ve just chosen to do it in a free-form style, so that it’s a little bit more engaging. We also had a method by which you could do it anonymously, which we have totally abolished across all of Toptal. We don’t have anyone have anonymity. And while I understand that there may be ramifications of people not being as forthcoming as they may, it’s really our duty to ensure that we create an environment where they can be.  MATT: When did you do that and why? TASO: We did that because you’re actually taking an action that encourages hiding and we don’t believe in hiding anything. We believe in radical transparency, radical truth, bringing difficult conversations and difficult topics to the forefront. And by taking that action, you’re saying “We actually believe in hiding something.” Well I don’t believe in that and I would say our executive team doesn’t believe in that, so we have abolished it. MATT: When did you abolish it? TASO: About seven or eight months ago. MATT: Pretty recent. TASO: Yes. MATT: I’ve got some quick ones as we wrap up. Tell me quickly what is your ideal workspace? Where are you productive? TASO: I am productive sitting at a desk I am familiar with.  MATT: Do you have a big monitor? What’s your —  TASO: I don’t have a very big monitor, I have a regular sized monitor, but I’m just familiar with the setting, it’s something about the familiar setting that allows me to be focused. So if I’m in a hotel room, my first impulse I suppose, is to get out of the hotel room, go to a meeting, go connect with someone because you’re traveling. It’s not to sit down and focus and go through Excel and dive deep into the nitty-gritty details of whatever it might be, whether they’re financial reports or they are reports about whatever it might be, and scrutinize them. Likewise, when I’m on a plane, I’m always reading. It’s just my natural state, so to speak, on a plane. And so whenever I’m at a desk that I’m familiar with, with my computer that I’m familiar with, I can do work much more productively. MATT: How often would you say you’re home versus on the road or traveling? TASO: I’d say it’s 80/20 now. So I am more so settled, working, than I am traveling. MATT: That’s a good thing to note, that a lot of people think remote or distributed means you’re on the road all the time. TASO: Oh no. MATT: And actually I think the vast majority of people at Automattic at least, they’re in the same place 95% of the time. TASO: 100%.  MATT: How about meetups? When does your team meet up in person, if ever? TASO: Yes, our executive team probably meets up on average every 18 months. So not so much, but I don’t see it as a requirement. When we meet up, it’s generally when there are some executive changes and we are unfamiliar with one another. And so —  MATT: And are there other meetups within the company? TASO: Yes. Actually, as we’re speaking right now there’s a function that’s having a meetup in Miami. MATT: So like all the designers, all the engineers might get together, something like that? TASO: Precisely. It’s a little bit too large for the engineering team, being about 200 people, to be able to do that, but yeah. On a functional basis, especially with some of the smaller functions, they’ll be doing that. MATT: Do you have any must-have equipment that makes for ideal work? TASO: A laptop and a phone. [laughs] MATT: That’s it? Nice. You mentioned Zoom, Slack, phone? Do you make phone calls? Do you talk to people? How much are you on text versus video, versus audio? TASO: I would say I have moved to mostly video. When I’m mobile I don’t do video generally because my battery is dying. [laughs] But generally I’m on audio when I am traveling and I’m on video when I’m situated. MATT: Last question. Let’s fast-forward 20 years from now, what percentage of jobs do you think will be distributed or remote? TASO: I believe that at least 50% of all technology jobs will be distributed. MATT: That’s wild. Because it’s probably, I don’t know, what is it today? Probably under 10%? TASO: It’s under 10%, but it is growing so fast and there is such a strong movement across the world for this. You have all of these strange companies, Toptal, Automattic, InVision, GitLab, so on and so forth. MATT: We’re not that strange. [laughter] But I get what you say. Right now it’s the exception. In the future I think it’s the rule. TASO: Exactly. And they’re looking at us saying “Okay, yeah, they created a billion dollar company. It’s a billion dollar company, we’re a $200 billion company. This is hogwash,” right? MATT: It’s a toy. Yeah. TASO: Well more and more people are doing it. More and more people are picking up on the fact that this is the future and that is becoming more and more compelling to the talent. So more talent are keen on working for those companies — the Toptals and the Automattics of the world. And that’s just going to grow.  So what’s going to happen is, all these small companies where they’re working remotely, well actually that’s going to be the majority of the talent in the world. And when these companies can’t recruit them anymore and there are millions of people working remotely that are skilled, and they’re saying, “Well we want you to work in our office,” they’re going to say, “You know what? I don’t work for companies like yours because you’re the old, stodgy company. You’re the company that doesn’t understand the future and opportunity and innovation.” And that’s when it’s going to come and force them to be remote. So you’re going to see that happen because the workforce of talented people is going to be more keen on remote work than not. And people don’t see that now but once they’re unable to recruit at all from anywhere, in effect, that’s when the change is actually going to happen. MATT: Amen. [laughter] I think that’s a great place to end it. Thank you again, Taso, and I hope to continue this conversation in the future.  TASO: Thank you. MATT: That was Taso Du Val, and I’m very glad he was able to join and share his experiences.  On the next episode of the Distributed podcast, I’ll be speaking to Lydia X.Z. Brown. Lydia is a lot of things: a writer, advocate, organizer, strategist, educator, speaker, and attorney. I’m interested in talking with Lydia about how distributed work can make work more accessible to people with all kinds of disabilities, and learning more about what inclusion means in a distributed context.  Thank you so much for joining us, and see you next time. 

Read more about Stephen Wolfram in “The Machine that Turns Ideas into Real Things.” Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. Stephen Wolfram started out on an academic career path, but eventually realized that founding a company would allow him to pursue his scientific work more efficiently. He’s served as a remote CEO of Wolfram Research for the last 28 years. In this episode, Stephen shares with host Matt Mullenweg — another remote CEO — his perspective on the value of geo-distribution, and the processes his partially-distributed company uses to make world-changing software.  The full episode transcript is below. *** MATT MULLENWEG: Howdy, howdy. Welcome to the Distributed podcast. I’m your host, Matt Mullenweg.  I got the chance to catch up with today’s guest, Stephen Wolfram, because my company Automattic invited him to give a talk at our annual company meetup in Orlando, Florida. This is a magical occasion where all 950+ Automatticians (which is what we call ourselves) get together to meet up face-to-face. This gives us an opportunity to hang out, break bread, and collaborate over the course of a few days. We also invite a number of speakers, smart people like Stephen. Stephen’s been leading Wolfram Research for 32 years, which is a really long time for a tech CEO. The company has pioneered a lot of different technologies in computation and education. Wolfram Research has about 850 employees, many of whom are scattered across 29 countries, so it’s pretty close in size to Automattic.  But Stephen’s been doing the remote CEO thing for way longer than I have — about 28 years! So naturally I wanted to pick his brain, which is an amazing brain, on why he chose to go the partially-distributed route, and learn about how he’s led his company remotely for longer than just about anybody.  Alright. Let’s get started.  MATT: Welcome. This is Distributed with Matt Mullenweg, and today we have Stephen Wolfram, who is the Founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, known for things such as Mathematica, an amazing tome called A New Kind of Science — which I guess you worked on for about ten and a half years — created Wolfram Alpha, which is one of the intelligence engines behind Alexa and Siri… STEPHEN WOLFRAM: Siri and other things, yeah. MATT: Yes, and of many other things. And just an incredible amount. I encourage you to google him. Go down the rabbit hole of all the amazing stuff and people he’s worked with and everything. Thank you so much for joining today. STEPHEN: Nice to be here. MATT: Part of the reason, in addition to all those fun things, that I wanted you to be here is your company is a similar size to Automattic, around 800-900, and is geo-distributed as well. STEPHEN: Yes. MATT: You have been a remote CEO since 1991. STEPHEN: That is correct. MATT: And your company goes back to..? STEPHEN: Late ’86. MATT: Possibly one of the older geo-distributed companies I’m familiar with. STEPHEN: I think so. I mean, I know —   MATT: It’s got to be one of the longest, if it’s not—   STEPHEN: Yes, you’re right. MATT: Maybe there’s something out there but that’s got to be one of the longest. STEPHEN: Right. MATT: That’s pretty cool. What caused you to be geo-distributed at the beginning? STEPHEN: So OK, the first thing was, I started the company. This was the second company I started. The first company I started, I started when I was 21 years old and that was in Los Angeles, and that company was a pretty traditional company. It was venture-capital funded, I brought in a CEO, I didn’t CEO it myself, I was the technical person —   MATT: Did they call it adult supervision back then? STEPHEN: No, no they didn’t. I mean that company went through various mergers and things and eventually went public some time in the 1990s in a very undistinguished IPO. So anyway, so my first company was not distributed at all, it sat in this building near the Los Angeles International Airport. [laughter]  I was involved in basic science and I had developed this area of science that I guess now gets called complexity theory, and so I tried to figure out what university would give me the best deal to start a research center in this kind of science. So I went around to lots of universities, and the one that won that was the University of Illinois in Champaign, Illinois. But I said, “OK, I’m going to start a company that builds the tools that I want to have for myself and that I perfectly well know are going to be useful to lots of other people in the world.” So we started the company in Champaign, Illinois, which is not probably most people’s first choice for where to start a tech company, even back in 1986, but it was great. We got terrific people from the area — it’s a good university, producing a lot of interesting graduates. We were the only game in town, so to speak, and I think we’re still the largest tech operation there. So we started in a slightly outlying place. Then [we] got off to a very quick start, up to a couple hundred employees, maybe 150 or something. I was injecting ideas into this thing at a very high rate. MATT: So when you inject ideas, you’re coming and saying, “Hey we should do this thing.” STEPHEN: Yes. And getting more and more frustrated that they weren’t getting done. I have to say that just a few years ago we finally finished my 1991 to-do list.  MATT: Ha! [laughter] STEPHEN: So it’s done, that one is — it finally, finally happened. MATT: That one’s… Yeah, the thing that got you to leave is now all the way complete.  STEPHEN: Yes, right. My original plan had been to build these tools that will, among other things, allow me to do the basic science that I wanted to do. I said, “Let me step back a bit and let me go off and spend some chunk of my time doing basic science, and let the company grow up and we’ll see what happens next. Maybe there will be a coup and somebody else will say ‘I can run this better than you can’.” MATT: So everyone was in the office except for you? STEPHEN: Not quite. What happened was — I’m trying to remember how many people weren’t in the office at that point, but I was definitely the main go-offsite person. MATT: What were the tools at that time? Was that because you had been in a university setting and were familiar with email or internet? STEPHEN: Yes, well I started using email in 1976. So that was —   MATT: That was pretty familiar to you. STEPHEN: Yes, right. It was modems dialing up. My email would arrive in bunches every 15 minutes. And I was on the phone a bunch. I had hired a chief operating officer. MATT: I was going to ask what the exec team looked like. You had a COO who could be the on-the-ground lead? STEPHEN: Right, who was with us for six or seven years. And he did a good job of maturing the company from being high-growth to something which had good systems in place and could roll forward.  MATT: And this second iteration of the company, did you also raise venture capital, or did you decide to take a different approach to have the longevity? STEPHEN: No, no, not at all. Version two — I was the CEO from the beginning and forever type [of] thing, no outside money ever. It’s been a shame for me that I’ve never really had a quote “business partner.” I think of myself as pretty average at business kinds of things but I’m not totally incompetent.  Personally I view it as an optimization. You can do things that are very commercial, but a little bit intellectually boring. And it tends to be the case that you’re doing a lot of rinse-and-repeat stuff if you want to grow purely commercially, so to speak, or you can do things that are wonderful intellectually, but the world doesn’t happen to value them and you can’t make commercial sense that way. And I’ve tried to navigate something in between those two where I’m really intellectually interested and where it’s commercially successful enough to sustain the process for a long time.  MATT: I love finding that intersection. STEPHEN: Oh yeah. MATT: And it feels like now that the world has caught up a little bit to voice assistance and the natural language processing stuff you’ve been working on forever, that you found — is that the main business model for Wolfram Research now? STEPHEN: No, no. MATT: Oh, I would’ve thought that licensing drove it because there must be billions of users of these voice assistants. STEPHEN: There are. Yes. And it’s a good source of revenue. At this point it’s fairly diverse. There’s a big chunk of licensing software but a lot of that — there’s, for example, the academic sector, there’s site licenses to universities where basically the goal is to make the software free for people to use at universities, and we’re complete now in the U.S. in the sense that all the major universities have site licenses. So if you’re any kind of major university in the U.S., you will be able to use our software for free. And there’s a lot of commercial use of software where we’re basically selling pre-packaged software. It’s been nice that it has been gradually quite diversified between different kinds of channels.  Back to the whole no venture capital do. It’s been great. I don’t have a boss. I recommend it. [laughter] And also I can do things —   MATT: I feel like you always have a boss. It might be a customer or all of the customers in the world.  STEPHEN: Yeah, at some level —   MATT: It could be the employees for whom you’ll respond to if they reach out. STEPHEN: That is correct. Yes, that is really what happens. But in the first approximation you think, “Oh, I can do anything,” and then the second approximation is, “Oh, we have all these customers. Oh, we have all these employees.” I take those responsibilities really seriously. But I’ve been doing them so long that they seem natural, so to speak. It’s a thing where there is a certain kind of intellectual freedom, that I at least believe that I have by virtue of the fact that I’m just responsible to myself. MATT: I will say that I think, as a result of so much capital flooding into the market, that there now are very long-term investors who, if you choose them correctly, can be aligned on longer time spans than the standard five to seven [year] fund life of some of the historical venture capital. STEPHEN: Right. MATT: And founders now are able to retain a lot of control through voting mechanisms. They might sell economic interest but [you’re] no longer selling control interest. STEPHEN: I always wonder how that’s going to come out in the end. I thought about taking my company public back in the early 1990s. We were on a great trajectory and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But then I was like, “Hmm, I don’t know.” Actually the final thing was my employees saying, “Why are we doing this? This doesn’t seem like a way to have a good time,” type thing.  MATT: That’s great that you had the kind of culture where people felt comfortable challenging that as well.  STEPHEN: Yes, yes. I think it’s fair to say that we have a culture — We have a lot of very bright people who have a lot of opinions. And I like to believe that we have a company where what we are mostly interested in is finding people who can be productive in our environment, and they have very different personalities. Some of them, I think I at least, have the view that they pretty much couldn’t work anywhere else because they’re —   MATT: [laughs] Unemployable. STEPHEN: They have very unusual personality traits and poor internal politics skills and so on. MATT: What makes them successful at Wolfram? STEPHEN: That they do good work. That’s the thing that I —   MATT: Part of good work is working with colleagues and the teamwork aspect. STEPHEN: Yes, yes. But I think that the role of management is given who these people are, how do you fit them together with what we are trying to do in such a way that you take advantage of their good traits. MATT: So to end the business thread, do you grow the employee base of the company along with the revenue or with your scope of what you’re trying to accomplish? STEPHEN: Good question. We have been lucky enough, touch wood, that we have been profitable every year for 31 years now. That is achieved by a very simple process, which is, spend less than you make. Thankfully we have never had to have a big “Oh my gosh, the revenue is less than we expected, let’s let people—” No. We’ve fortunately never had that. Our general principle is we’ll pay Champaign, Illinois rates for a certain set of people. Other people, it will be based on where they are, but we’re never going to go above that.  So that means when people wind up in San Francisco or New York, we’ll often lose them because we’re not going to pay the rates that people expect and need in those places. On the other hand, if they find some obscure place somewhere, they’re going to be doing really well because —   MATT: I recommend Houston, where I’m based. Not too obscure and a very reasonable place to leave. STEPHEN: Yes, we have quite a number of people in Texas. I think we may even have a couple people in Houston. I’d have to look at the map. MATT: I read some really interesting research hypothesis around why geographic mobility has gone down in the United States. You would think people would move more for economic opportunity but it has actually gone down. And the conclusion of this was the blocker was two-income households.  STEPHEN: Yes. MATT: Where if one person were moving, and the sole breadwinner, you only have to find one job. And now you have to find two jobs in the new city, which is at least twice as hard. STEPHEN: That’s interesting, yes. MATT: But when one of the partners has no geographic attachments, you end up following. I just talked to a colleague who ended up in Copenhagen and he’s from — I forget where — some place very far from Copenhagen. He said, “Yeah, my wife got a research job and now we’re in Copenhagen for a few years.”  STEPHEN: Yes, we find that all the time. There were some obscure ones. Like there’s one guy in our user interface team who’s been at the company a long time, but he said, “Well I’m going to go remote and I’m going to this island off the coast of Nicaragua because my wife is a primatologist and she is studying… What were they? Some kind of monkey-like creatures on this island. And he got a microwave link set up, and there he was, being perfectly productive. MATT: Impressive. STEPHEN: To me the focus is on — Can you be productive? Are you doing good stuff? And then where you live is your independent business, so to speak. There is a certain amount of complexity in scheduling things and meetings and so on when people are in all different time zones, but somehow that doesn’t end up being that horrifying. MATT: Is there some sort of predetermined taxonomy or is it more of a free-form? STEPHEN: It’s free-form. One of the things that is fun about my company is I think of us as a microcosm of what goes on, because we have people from the history PhDs who are actually doing history stuff for us, to the people who are doing — whether it’s graphic design or whether it’s some software engineering, server infrastructure thing.  One of the things we’ve done — I don’t know how you’ve done this — but the company is pretty vertically integrated in the sense that we don’t outsource anything really. It’s all in-house graphic design, legal, this, that, and the other. Partly because we’ve got enough stuff going on that there’s not really a group that’s going to have nothing to do. And it also really, really helps to have, let’s say, designers who really know and understand our technology, and they’ve met customers of ours and they know the story. And plus some of the people in our design group become really good Wolfram Language programmers.  MATT: Cool. Actually some of our best developers and architects started off as designers. STEPHEN: Yes, I think it’s a really good field to start in. It’s funny, because I track where people come from and so on, and physics, for example, is good. For the techies, it’s a really good export field, so to speak, and I think graphic design is another one of these good export fields, where you learn a certain discipline of thinking to do good graphic design.  For a while it seemed like UX was — we were pretty early in the hiring of official UX people and it seemed like that might be taking off more in that direction, but I think it’s a little bit merged with the graphic design. And I feel like sometimes the designers — they always have something to show for what they’ve done, in a sense, whereas UX is a little bit less clear. Somebody made this flow diagram or something but that turned into something different from what finally came out. MATT: The visual communication helps a ton, right, for getting people on the same page? STEPHEN: Yes.  MATT: It’s one thing we’re trying to do more, is just draw something, even if you’re not an artist or a designer or anything, so you really are on the same page, literally, with what you’re trying to communicate. STEPHEN: Yes. I don’t know in your geo-distributed setup, but we never use video conferencing, I mean really never, to the point where —   MATT: It’s always screen sharing and voice? STEPHEN: It’s just screen sharing and voice. MATT: It’s mostly video actually, with us. And what was interesting to me observing it from the outside, is before Zoom, we had very few meetings because I felt like the process was so frustrating to everyone, we just didn’t do it. And Zoom spread like wildfire in our organization because there was just something to it that made it —  It worked just a bit better, it got over that threshold, whatever that uncanny valley was that kept us from using it before. And now I think we have too many meetings, perhaps. But video is a thing, and people think about their background and try to have good lighting. Good audio is really important to me personally. STEPHEN: Yes. Good audio is very important to me. I am always complaining about that.  MATT: I will send you a link to the Sennheiser headset we like. It’s USB and it’s only about $34. It’s become very standard. STEPHEN: OK, I’d like that. Yes, we’ve spent lots of effort on headsets for people and complaining about people not having the right audio setup and so on. And I am glad to know that I’m not the only person who really cares about that. MATT: It makes a huge difference. I’ll use this opportunity to tell people to check out your blog post. Was it “Seeking the Productive Life?” STEPHEN: Yes. MATT: On your WordPress-powered blog. STEPHEN: Indeed. MATT: Which is a very comprehensive view of your entire personal operating system and productivity, which I found — well, it’s impossible to summarize. And then two, we used this to point to [the fact] that you have started livestreaming many of your design meetings. STEPHEN: Yes. MATT: And so I could probably google “Wolfram livestream” or something? STEPHEN: Probably, yes, right. MATT: And so these actual internal meetings are now broadcasting publicly, which is pretty unique and fascinating. STEPHEN: That is correct. This livestream meetings thing, I started doing it about a year and a half ago or something because I thought, these meetings are fascinating. It’s a shame for these things to just go off into the ether and nobody —  so I thought, let’s do this. MATT: It’s mostly screens and then audio? STEPHEN: Screens and audio, no people. We’ll get people who are both expert users of our product and often world experts in the particular thing that we are talking about. And they show up and they contribute useful things. MATT: It’s interesting. You have a lot about your company which is very much like how open source works, but a lot of what you do is not open source, correct? STEPHEN: That is correct. MATT: There is a post I read about this while doing some research, 12 reasons — I think one of your colleagues wrote it — that Wolfram Language wasn’t open source. And one of them was, things like language design aren’t benefited from being more open, is how I interpreted one of them. STEPHEN: Yes, probably, yes. I think — look, it’s a complicated thing because my goal is to be able to produce this intellectually valuable, long-term thing. And the question is, given the world as it is, what is the best way to do that. And we have built, back 33 years ago, when I started the company — it was like, OK, we’re going to sell pre-packaged software. And I didn’t know whether that industry would survive. I mean back at that time —  MATT: It wasn’t clear, right? Piracy was huge.  STEPHEN: Yes, piracy was a big problem. Another big problem was, what was the price point going to be for software? Because at that time there was Borland versus Microsoft. Borland was at $100, Microsoft was at $500 for typical software. And it’s like, who’s going to win in that space? MATT: How much is Mathematica? STEPHEN: Well it’s very complicated. [laughter] It ranges from —   MATT: How much was it at the beginning? STEPHEN: It was $495. But no, I think what we’ve done — it’s a thing I’ve thought about quite a bit — what is the right way to slice — We are trying to do a long-term, intellectually valuable thing, having something — maintaining that kind of coherence over a long period of time, I don’t know what the best way to do it is. I think we have found a pretty good scheme. Wolfram Alpha has been free from the beginning to use. We recently introduced this thing, a free Wolfram engine for developers, which people seem to like. And the deal is, using it for development, it’s free, you can do whatever you want with it. But if your work product is what it is producing, if it is actually in production, that’s when you have to start paying something for it. MATT: I think it’s interesting, you’re adopting some of the elements of what helps open source become ubiquitous, and some of the open things that, by the way, open source didn’t invent — they came from academia and many things before, in terms of the collaboration — and I think it’s very cool. STEPHEN: An important thing for us is the alignment of where we make money versus who is actually getting value, who our real customers are. And I think some of the cracks that are happening in some of the areas of the technology industry — I think come from a lack of alignment between — who are the actual customers? Well the actual customers are advertisers, they are not the people who are — whatever else. And I think we have been both lucky in that our customer base is wonderful people we really like. The thing that tended to happen though is these projects that — it starts open source and then there is some kind of bait-and-switch somewhere. And it just drives me crazy. We keep on —   MATT: I totally agree. And that was the open-source model for a long time. We’re going to be open source but then hey, that open-source license is really scary, don’t use it, buy our proprietary license, or things like that. STEPHEN: Right. MATT: Or we’re going to put all the good, new stuff in this proprietary version of the license.  STEPHEN: Right, right. MATT: That’s why I want to talk more about open source at some point because, if you look at — They’re not always the best products, Wikipedia was not the best, WordPress in some ways you could say is not the best. Chromium engine — I don’t know if you saw the engine behind Chrome was just actually adopted by Internet Explorer. STEPHEN: Yeah.  MATT: So we’re getting a ubiquity and a de-facto standardization of a code base that becomes so useful. STEPHEN: Right. MATT: You could never force Microsoft and Google to say, “We’re going to do the same thing.” But they have, through their own personal utility maximization, have chosen to collaborate in this one area, which is really beautiful. STEPHEN: That’s interesting. There are these different things, like, let people see the source, right? I don’t care if people see the source, that’s not the issue. I mean that’s not the point. Although we did have an interesting experience.  So one thing happened because our products get used for lots of fancy, tech-y things. At the very beginning we would have the following sort of thing that would happen. Some mathematician would come up at a trade show and say, “How can I trust your stuff, I can’t see inside how everything works?” And I’d say, “Well how can we trust these papers you’re writing?” It’s kind of like, their mechanism for validity is peer review. Our mechanism for validity is software quality assurance, which is a lot better.  MATT: I take it you have some opinions on peer review? STEPHEN: Oh, it’s terrible. I think peer review is — I always thought it was broken, even when I was in the business, so to speak. My point of view was, if I have an original paper or idea, it’s going to be really tough to get it through a peer review process. 1986 was the last time I published a paper in an academic journal. I decided they were a bad idea and I wasn’t going to do it. MATT: And now you have a blog, which is even better. STEPHEN: Yes, the blog is — some of the things I write on the blog are quite academic. And it’s really interesting, I remember I was writing a piece about Ada Lovelace, actually, at the time of her 200th birthday celebration. And I happened to, at the last minute, I decided to go to England and go to some fancy celebration that was happening about it.  And I was visiting some museum that has a bunch of her papers and so on, which I’d already got copies of most of. But the curator there was saying, who was used to academic stuff, was saying, “When do you think you’ll be publishing this?”, thinking the answer would be a year from now or something. And it’s like, well no, I’m going to publish it tomorrow morning before I get on a plane. Because you can write anything there.  MATT: And you do. STEPHEN: And I write some stuff that’s quite technical and some stuff that is quite product-oriented. MATT: Back to that live-streaming of meetings. I think it’s great that you say the meetings are kind of like they were before you live-streamed. They’re not too performative or anything. STEPHEN: Yes. MATT: I’ll add something else to that, which is you said you’re a CEO for life, more or less, there is a lot of authority vested in you and this company, but it also seems simultaneously that people are comfortable with challenging you and presumably the other executives. What do you feel like you’ve done to foster that culture where there is a comfort, it sounds like, at many levels to challenge you very directly? STEPHEN: Yes, it’s an interesting question. I suppose that I’m actually prepared to listen at some point. Some of these things get quite heated. It’s hardly as if — I don’t necessarily — I kind of know myself well enough to know by the time I’m getting heated, I don’t know what I’m talking about. That is the typical — and I will even say that because if I can explain myself, I’m just going to explain myself. And it’s always frustrating when people don’t speak up and don’t say —   MATT: Do you do anything to encourage people who you might feel are hanging back a little in the meeting? STEPHEN: Yes. I am enough of a people person. The fact is that having been running a company for 33 years, if I wasn’t a people person it would have driven me nuts, OK? MATT: Or them away and there wouldn’t be a company. [laughs] STEPHEN: Yes, yeah, right. I like people, I find people interesting. Sometimes I would say, more cynically I would say, after I’ve been managing people for 40-something years, and you might have thought you’ve seen every pathology that could possibly happen. But no, there is always a new one. At this point I just find it faintly amusing that — “Oh my gosh, another bizarre thing I’ve never seen before.” And I see a large part of my role being that I’ve got all these talented people, I’ve got all of these projects we’d like to do, how do we match talented people with projects we want to do? MATT: Do people feel like they’re moving around or is there some stability once they get onto a project? STEPHEN: There is as much stability as they want, basically. There are people who have worked at the company for 20 years, and have never done management even though I can tell they have a good personality to do management. And finally we persuade them, you should do this, and they say, “Oh this is actually quite interesting.” MATT: Is that more in your head or do you do any sort of testing or other objective ways to determine people’s strength or potential abilities? STEPHEN: No, nothing, other than the Who Knows What database of just factual information.  MATT: And does this all come from you or is this also the rest of your executive team? STEPHEN: No, there is a bunch of people who have gotten experienced at doing this, I would say. When I look at org charts of companies I always —   MATT: I love org charts. STEPHEN: Yes, right. That was probably a decade ago, I was like “Oh, our org chart is such a mess.” For a long time, our org chart was classified because there were people, it was like, particularly one person who was with the company for a long time, and has now spun off doing related things, but who was an executive at the company and was always like, “We shouldn’t really tell people what all the weird reporting arrangements are.” I wasn’t a big believer in this but it wasn’t…  But then, look at our org chart, and it seems messy in many ways. And then I was working — actually that was with Microsoft — and somebody who is actually now an even much more promoted executive at Microsoft, said to me, “We were trying to understand how it worked.” He said, “There’s this company on the outside that has reverse-engineered the Microsoft org chart, we just buy their stuff to understand what’s going on.” MATT: That’s funny. STEPHEN: Yes, right. So I get this thing and it’s a big foldout thing and it’s fascinating because it’s a huge mess. I mean, I don’t remember whether it’s still a mess but at that time it was a huge mess and you could see lots of historical stuff. And so after that I felt so much better about our org chart. Although, our org chart is now much cleaner, I would say. MATT: It’s the map and the territory, right? Our org chart is currently clean but it’s not comprehensive, so there are some things that aren’t represented on the org chart, which sometimes a person is in two different places, that might be represented, but then they have informal authority in an area that we don’t try to demarcate necessarily.  STEPHEN: Right. MATT: We have had a lot of success, actually, removing everything compensation-related from the management structure. So there’s only a few, only the centralized HR deals with all that and everyone else just focuses on getting the job done and peer feedback and everything. STEPHEN: One thing at our company, which was a long-time joke, was the claim there are more projects than people at the company.  MATT: Yes, we have the same thing, wow.  STEPHEN: It has been a running joke — can we actually inventory all the projects? Well now we’ve, thankfully — I’ve got this team together to just go and do that and it has been a good process actually. MATT: Are you familiar with Marie Kondo? STEPHEN: Sure. MATT: You know her thing is you put all the stuff that is the same, like all the clothing, in one pile. It sounds like you’re doing that from an organizational point of view. STEPHEN: Yes, yeah…  MATT: You’re trying to get all that stuff together so you can sort it out. STEPHEN: Right. I’d certainly like to apply software design methodologies to the way that we’re doing things. Look, the thing that we have done that I think has worked pretty well is we have pretty good project management, tradition, and infrastructure. And part of that is, I’ll come up with some crazy idea, actualizing that has to be flowed through the organization. Now to be fair, I think I am probably — one of my less-bad traits is that I’ll come up with these ideas and then people will say, “How on earth are we going to actually do that?” And I will actually know, that is, if they don’t. It will be like, because I know enough about engineering and the whole technology stack, that I’ll be like, “Look, we can — some thing or other thing has to be authenticated here, and do this and that and the other, and I can actually dive down to a pretty high level of detail about how it should be done. And I think part of my role is to explain why things aren’t impossible. And I see increasingly with a lot of projects we have done, the first response is, “That’s just impossible.” I’ll have some idea and it’s — and actually I am happy when people say that. When I’m not happy is when people say, “Oh sure, we’ll do it,” when I plainly know there is no way they can do it, it’s too hard. And so then I’m trying to figure out, “OK, so let’s see whether we can figure out how to do it.”  I think the other thing that I find I do a lot of now is, we have all these projects connecting — I’ll be in some meeting and somebody will be talking about, “Oh, I’m doing this, this, and this,” and I’ll say, “Oh, you should talk to so-and-so because they’re doing something similar.” And we were doing stuff to do with external storage systems. We have this group that’s been doing database integration and a blockchain group, and they all have things to do with this external storage story, and that becomes part of the role — explaining, just knowing enough about what’s going on around the company. MATT: And how in this — I’m curious from a software point of view — how does maintenance work in this structure? STEPHEN: Well that’s a good question. First of all, a lot of things we do in the language are quite modular. There’s a function, it fits into the language, but it doesn’t have a lot of nasty, dangling interdependency.  MATT: Gotcha. STEPHEN: We’ve gotten a lot of experience and good systems for doing software quality assurance, and I think we are pretty good at doing that. Some of the QA we have to do is kind of hair-raising, like a lot of real-time things, which are always difficult, but even for Wolfram Alpha, there is — the natural language is a fundamentally non-modular thing.  MATT: Yes. STEPHEN: So the classic example is if you type in “50 cents,” you have money, if you type in “50 Cent,” you get the rapper as the default thing. What happens when there is another rapper who is called “30 Cent” or something? That’s a very non-modular thing, and you have to be able to deal with all those kinds of situations. But I think we have done pretty well at that. What we tend to do are these big subsystems. They get swept through every some number of years, and then a lot of stuff gets — a lot of things that we’ll fix —   MATT: Who decides to sweep through the system? Is it because a number of bugs accumulate?  STEPHEN: No, it’s not as organized as that. That’s a good question. It ends up being the people who run those engineering teams. I have to say that I am pleased with their level of responsibility in the sense that we are going to rewrite a bunch of the UI stuff because it’s out of date. MATT: On the converse side, sometimes I believe it’s easier to write code than read code. STEPHEN: Yes. MATT: And so you get sometimes new engineers on an area who want to rewrite it partially to understand it. STEPHEN: That’s true. MATT: So how do you keep the over-read factor? STEPHEN: Yes, right. Well I push back on that and say, “Why are we doing this?” In fact, I was just doing that yesterday, a particular thing. It’s like, we can do this wonderful thing — why are we doing this? This is not an important feature, this is just not the time to do it. MATT: Are there programs around learning and developments or ongoing training? STEPHEN: The one constant is a lot of our development, most of our development is in our own language. But at this point, most of the people we hire know it.  MATT: Before they get there? STEPHEN: Yes, it’s kind of scary that the system is older than many of the employees. And they’re like, “Oh yeah, I started learning this when I was ten years old” type of thing. So that’s —  MATT: I’ve started to have conversations like that in WordPress and it is very humbling. STEPHEN: Yes, yes, right. For some areas I let different managers have different rules about how they set that up, but some people insist the person should come to an actual office for some number of months when they start to get —   MATT: This is onboarding. STEPHEN: Yes, right. And that seems to work well in some cases. And I don’t know whether it’s really necessary, I haven’t really — we haven’t done a —   MATT: Would a prospective employee know what kind of team they’re joining? STEPHEN: Yes. MATT: Are you hiring for specific teams or are they generally open roles and you try to place people based on their —  STEPHEN: We are placing people. But by the time they are actually joining, it’s pretty clear what they’re going to be doing, for sure.  MATT: You’ll say, “Hey, you’ll need to come to Champaign for two months,” or something? STEPHEN: Yes, right. sometimes we’re hiring people where it’s like, “When I finish my PhD I’ll come,” and they’ll start in some number of months and we’ll say, “Well we’ll have something interesting for you to do.” MATT: By then. STEPHEN: Yes right, yes. MATT: Let’s say I’m a coder in Houston and I apply to Wolfram. What is my process like on the way to being hired, assuming I will get hired? STEPHEN: That’s a good question, actually, I don’t — I have to say, I regret the fact that I don’t get to see most of the frontline applications, only some of the more senior ones. I used to look at a bunch of these things. Cover letters are, to me, a critical part of the story. I haven’t been reading them recently because I have —  MATT: That’s why I don’t like applicant tracking systems, or form applications. I want to see how they email, what client they used, what fonts there are, how they formatted it. I want to see everything about the application as free-form as possible. STEPHEN: Yes, right. What I find is that when I used to read these things a lot, the ones that were just, “Oh my god, I can’t believe this.” “I just graduated in computer science from this place and therefore I am qualified for whatever.” It’s like, no. And then there are other ones which say —   MATT: There are some cover letters though that are such a good story, and you can get a sense for someone’s clarity of writing. STEPHEN: Yes, yeah, right. Well, also some of the ones that are more fun are things like, “I’ve been reporting bugs in your software for six or seven years now, I want to come and help fix them,” type of thing. That’s kind of cool. MATT: What are the characteristics that you feel particularly makes someone successful at Wolfram Research? STEPHEN: A certain independence of mind, that they can think about — that they keep the thinking apparatus engaged at all times. Oh, yes, a very important one — no bullshit. That’s a —  MATT: How do you detect that though? STEPHEN: It’s really easy, I think. You just listen in the interview how people will say, “Oh, yes I know all about that process.” Well, I know a tiny bit. And sometimes —   MATT: Some people can be more humble in their —   STEPHEN: Right. MATT: So interviews are very high-pressure. We do a lot of our interviewing on text, on a chat.  STEPHEN: Oh that’s interesting. MATT: And that’s partially because we found that there is a class of people for whom a real-time conversation like this can be incredibly intimidating. There’s an asymmetry as well. They’re hoping for a new job and they just don’t perform well in that situation. That looks like almost nothing else we do in most people’s daily work. The interview, it’s very artificial. But the text chat looks a lot like what an average developer might do most of the day. STEPHEN: That’s interesting. MATT: So it can allow people that kind of space to — it’s like a take-home test a little bit. They can take five minutes to respond to something, they can Google something, if they get really freaked out by the question, they can take a walk around the table. STEPHEN: I have to say, in all the interviewing that I do, people sometimes come into it tense but I don’t think — I think if you’re doing interviewing right, the people aren’t that tense. MATT: It’s probably an inherent power dynamic that is impossible for you, in particular, to remove. STEPHEN: Maybe, maybe. MATT: Well text removes that even more. STEPHEN: Yes. I would say that at some level, if the people are sufficiently intimidated, that’s probably not a great indicator, because the fact is, in our company, there are a bunch of strong opinions and people will express themselves. And if somebody is like, “Oh no, I can’t deal with that,” that probably isn’t a great indicator.  I have to say, it’s a different thing with more senior folk, like business people and things like that. That’s a horrifying world of interviewing, for me at least. Because people who have, who are used to a very polished presentation, it’s just so difficult to find out who is the actual person here.  MATT: How do you balance that pattern matching? Not leading the confirmation bias or where the company might need to evolve, which might be different from where it has been in the past? STEPHEN: I’m a guy who likes new stuff, so that helps me be more change-oriented. I have to say that by the time it’s working smoothly, I’m not the person to be dealing with that. I have for myself and my personal life, I have endless systems that I have developed and they work, but also sometimes they stop working and then I’m like, “Oh, this doesn’t work anymore, I’m going to change it.”  For example, it could be the case that the things that I like and that resonate with me and that are the directions that I think of going are just not the ones the world happens to be keen on. A couple years ago I was like, “Let’s look at VR and AR.” And it’s like, well, I have a bunch of long-term people at the company, and they said, “You told us that in the early 1990s.” MATT: That’s funny. STEPHEN: What a bust that was at that time. You’re going to have to do better this time to convince us. And I have to say, I couldn’t. I couldn’t really convince them. Or IoT is another area where we’ve done a bunch of stuff, a bunch of interesting things, but it hasn’t quite taken off the way that I think some people thought it would. This question of, when you’re the CEO, when do you fire yourself, type thing, and do you change, or is the thing going in a direction that you just don’t want to change it?  MATT: And your name is in the company, so how does that happen? STEPHEN: Yes, right. MATT: Is it just “research” at that point?  STEPHEN: Right. That’s an interesting issue. I was thinking —   MATT: We joke Automattic would be just “Auto-ic.”  STEPHEN: Right, right. I’ve been thinking of this. I was thinking at one time if I had a club of people who had named their companies after themselves. And you’ll be a partial member, right? MATT: Thank you. Well we luckily have, I think, 17 other Matts at the company, so it could keep going without me. STEPHEN: OK, OK. But I think —   MATT: Yes, I do joke — the egotistical founder, we always slip our name in. I want to ask two things as we wrap up. You have a lot of trust, it sounds like, which just allows this very candid communication, candor between folks. Do you have something like the meetups that we’re doing here?  STEPHEN: Yes, it’s not quite as formal. Once a year we have a technology conference. Users come, they have a good time, they get to meet a bunch of our employees. The employees come, they have a good time, they get to meet a bunch of our users.  MATT: Cool. Well after all this time, would you consider management or running a company computationally reducible? STEPHEN: [laughs] That is a good question. This is one of the embarrassing things about people who like to think they’ve invented paradigms for thinking about stuff. The question is, “Can you live your own paradigm?” And it’s often the case in these things where I can see something developing at the company — I’ve been doing this a long time so I know how this story ends.  From the point of view of science and technology, there are things we’ve invented, I’ve invented. I could be very worried. Is the world ever going to pay attention to this, is the world ever going to care? Maybe I’m just too arrogant, but the fact is, I just know it’s going to go that way. This thing about computational language and the importance of having a rich language which can express computational thoughts, this is inexorable. This is going to be really important. I don’t know how long it will take the world to realize how important that is. MATT: It’s not if, it’s when? STEPHEN: Yes, yes.  MATT: Well that’s a good place to wrap up. Stephen, thank you so much. This has been an endlessly fascinating discussion and I’m looking forward to continuing it over dinner. STEPHEN: Sounds good.  MATT: This has been Distributed with Matt Mullenweg and we’ll see you next time. MATT: That was Stephen Wolfram. You can find him on Twitter at @stephen_wolfram. That’s Stephen with a PH, underscore, Wolfram — W-O-L-F-R-A-M. He also has an awesome blog, if you just google his name and “blog.” It’s powered by WordPress of course, and it’s really good. Stephen says that he set out to build a company that would, quote, “allow him to build the tools to do what he wanted to do.” And by that he means working on projects that he calls “intellectually valuable.” It’s easy for CEOs to come up with lofty mission statements, but very few actually follow through. I’m inspired by Stephen’s steadfast commitment to intellectually valuable work and the organizational freedom that has allowed him to pursue it across three decades — and hopefully for many more to come.  Next time on the Distributed podcast, we’ll be talking to Taso Du Val, the CEO of Toptal, a freelancer network where employers can access a highly curated pool of remote contractors. Toptal itself is fully distributed, and they’re trying to convince blue-chip companies to integrate remote talent onto their teams, so I’m excited to talk about how this could help usher in a distributed future. Thanks for joining us, and see you next time. 

Sonal Gupta leads Automattic's Other Bets division, focusing on innovative projects outside the company's core business. She discusses the allure of a distributed work culture, contrasting it with traditional corporate roles. Key topics include Automattic's unique onboarding process, emphasizing asynchronous communication, and the tools that facilitate collaboration among global teams. Gupta also shares insights on the importance of effective communication and innovative hiring practices that cultivate a strong company culture.

Read more about Scott Berkun in “Observe, Don’t Surveil: Managing Distributed Teams with Respect.” Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. Scott Berkun wrote the book on distributed teams. Literally. He spent a couple of years at Automattic and wrote about his experience as a manager in a distributed company. In this episode, Scott talks about that experience, discusses how things have changed since, and explains how today’s managers can cultivate a shared vision in a distributed team. The full episode transcript is below. *** Matt Mullenweg: I want for you to imagine that you’ve been hired as a manager at a scrappy startup where there are no meetings, no hierarchy — not even an office. How do you make people feel like they’re part of a team? How do you brainstorm, and how do you make sure the work’s getting done? Is it possible to cultivate a shared vision, structure, and goals by only meeting in person twice a year?  That’s what Scott Berkun faced nine years ago, when I hired him to join a little company called Automattic, which is the parent company of WordPress.com, which I founded in 2005.  As you know from listening to this podcast, Automattic is fully distributed, with no central office and more than 900 employees working from 68 countries. When Scott joined us, we were quite a bit smaller, we were using IRC instead of Slack, and there was a lot that we were still figuring out. Scott wrote a book about his experience at Automattic called The Year Without Pants, and since then he’s written a whole bunch of books about management, culture, and how we work. Today he’s a sought-after speaker on creativity and innovation. I caught up with Scott in Seattle to talk about his experience at Automattic, and everything he’s learned since then. Has the future of work panned out like we first imagined it? Matt: We used to work together, actually.  SCOTT BERKUN: We did used to work together. I used to work for you. [laughs] Matt: Well let’s talk a little bit about how that happened, because that was an interesting arc in the story. Scott: Yes. That was probably 2009 that you asked me to come to an Automattic Grand Meetup and you wanted me to advise on the team or lack of team structure at the company at the time. That was the first time that we officially were working together.  Matt: That’s an intriguing hook. Scott: Yes. Matt: And I guess that was a point when Automattic was totally flat, right?  Scott: Yes. Matt: It was like 50 or 60 people all reporting to me. I don’t know how that worked, actually. Scott: That’s right, yes. [laughs]  Matt: I don’t remember. Scott: We talked a few months later about me joining Automattic as a lead of one of the newly formed teams at the company. Matt: Before that you had been at Microsoft for a while? Scott: I was a team lead, a project manager guy for about nine years there and I wrote a book about it, which is — probably how we first knew of each other is that you were on my mailing list that was about project management. Matt: Oh was that the Art and Science — the Project… Scott: Yes. That’s how we first titled the book. And then when WordPress launched I used it for my blog and that’s how we got to know each other. Matt: Can we plug that book really quick? What’s the new title? Scott: The title is Making Things happen. That’s the title of the book now. Matt: I highly recommend it. That’s the one with the matches on the cover, right? Scott: That’s right. Matt: I really enjoyed that book. Scott: But that was the beginning of my full-time remote work experience was working for you at Automattic. And I remember one of my biggest reasons for wanting to do it was that it very clear in your mind and in my mind that this was an experiment. Can we bring this experienced manager from a traditional company into a company like Automattic that has all these special things — being remote is one of them — but the high autonomy that every individual employee had — continuous deployment, was another. And then the notion of teams itself was an experiment. And then there was also this other notion that you knew that I was going to write a book about this, which was this other curveball to the whole thing. Matt: Yeah. Scott: And that combination of experiments — I love the word experiment, and when you used that word, I felt like no matter how this went, it was going to go well. For one of us, at least.  [laughter] Matt: Yeah, sometimes those book documentary projects don’t go as well. Scott: No. The distributed work element wasn’t my greatest concern. I was worried about that but I was more worried about — do my skills as a manager in a traditional company where it’s an open office — you see people everyday. Could those skills transfer well to distributed work and to a far more autonomous culture in terms of the individual’s relationship to their work — how much control they had. I was more concerned about those things than distributed work.  Matt: I think this is a big concern of a lot of managers who have worked one way their whole career and then might be thinking about joining or starting or working in a distributed fashion. What did you see your superpowers as when you were in these in-person cultures? Scott: I don’t know that I ever thought I had a superpower. I thought —  Matt: Well you’re a modest guy so let’s call it “medium-powers,” that made you effective at what you were doing. Scott: I thought that, and I still think this, that most managers are really not very good at managing. Most people you talk to, when they come home from work, they’re not that happy about how well they’ve been managed — they have complaints. And that may extend out to the way the team is organized or the way the goals for their product has been set.  I thought that I was a good team manager in that I remembered all of my bad experiences as an employee and I tried to work really hard not to repeat those mistakes. And I gave a lot of autonomy to employees because I was one of those employees who liked a lot of control. Once I’ve earned some trust I wanted to be able to run and go at full speed. And the best managers I had are ones who are comfortable giving me that much control. And I tried to rely on that as a strength coming to Automattic. Because everyone was already independent. I have to start out by saying I may not actually add any value at all. I need to observe first to see how things are going before I have any reason to change anything.  And that’s a common mistake that new managers make everywhere, that they come in and they’ve got this new salary, this new job title, and it kicks their ego in and now it’s about them — How am I going to change the team, how am I going to change the organization? But you don’t know anything, you don’t know these people, you don’t know what their strengths or weaknesses are, you have no data.  So the best thing you can do — and this comes up in the book that that was what my strategy was for two months — I’m just a note taker. When we have meetings, I’m just going to take notes. I’m going to observe, I’m going to reflect back. And then little by little, once I have something useful to say, I’ll put it into — well it was IRC then but it’d be Slack now — little by little I’ll just try to show, A, I’m not stupid, B, I’m not trying to get in your way, and C, I may actually have some insight that will help you be more productive or successful or happier. And you have to earn that even if you’re the most senior person on the team or the company or whatever. Matt: How do those meetings happen? Scott: Well obviously there weren’t teams yet so there were no meetings. [laughter] So what we agreed to do was —  Matt: Were those Skype calls?  Scott: It was all text. Matt: Everyone would be there at the same time, once a week? Scott: Yeah. And we would chat about whatever everyone was working on. And it started off really short and little by little we added more structure, then we moved to Skype and then eventually the big breakthrough was we switched to audio! Woohoo! It was a big deal because everyone was fully paying attention. Matt: We’ve had different experiences on audio meetings. Scott: Yes… Matt: Just to define some of those terms… Scott: Yeah. Matt: IRC is a text-only chat.  Scott: Correct. Matt: Think of it like Slack but with a really old school version, like almost terminal-like interface. Scott: Old school, yes, old school Slack. Matt: Skype is a messaging platform plus voice. Scott: Yup. Matt: And is that what you did the voice meetings on? Scott: Yeah. We agreed we’d keep the meetings really short but every communication tool is good for some things and bad for others. And text has the advantage that you have time to think but the downside is that written language takes away a lot of data. You can’t hear someone’s inflection in their voice, or pick up on how loud or quiet they are. There’s a lot of data that you lose.  And having a moment every week where we were on audio, even if it was just for five minutes or ten minutes, emotionally, in terms of your relationship, in terms of understanding people’s nuances and sense of humor, their sarcasm — you could only get that through audio. And you don’t need that much, you don’t need to have two-hour meetings, but ten minutes a week to hear everyone, what they’re talking about, what they’re excited about — you get more data. And I think that helped us throughout the rest of the week. Matt: That was enough for you to get what you needed to be an effective manager to this team? Scott: That was enough to help prove that I had some value. Because people would leave those meetings when they were run well saying “Yeah that took 25 minutes but now I understand what Andy is working on, and I see now that’s going to help me later.” That was 25 good minutes as opposed to the typical way people feel about most meetings, which is [that] it’s about other people, it’s all just FYI, stuff that doesn’t go anywhere and it seems that the person running the meeting cares a lot about having them, even though no one else really is engaged.  And then little by little it became natural for the team to look to me to set the goals and to help decide what features should be next or what things should be built. But you can’t do that as a leader without having some forum for those things to happen. And that’s what the weekly meeting was for us. Matt: Is that how you saw managers come up in Microsoft as well or was this a unique approach you created for this opportunity? Scott: I saw a wide range of styles at Microsoft. And this was more like the style that I preferred. I wanted to start off by trusting everyone and extending trust before I ask them to trust me. That’s just good —   Matt: That’s a really powerful concept, yeah.  Scott: That’s good relationship management. But I knew there has to be cadence. That’s the fancy word. There has to be a rhythm. If you’re on a team there’s a rhythm. You think of people who are competitive rowers, and there’s that person at the front of the boat who’s just — their job is just to yell out the rhythm, that’s all that they’re doing, the coxswain, right? Matt: Yeah.  Scott: They’re taking up weight on the boat simply to be the person who’s controlling the rhythm. And any team, even if people are working individually for the most part but there’s some things that overlap, someone has to be setting the rhythm for the week, the rhythm for the month, and to help people set their own rhythm for the day. And that’s what I thought my job was. Matt: One thing I hear a lot about people who have had a lot of experience in a physical office is they get so much value from the kind of drop-in or walking around because you get — what you said you get with just a little bit of audio is an even higher bandwidth, right? If we go text, a little bit, audio better, video more — you can see faces — and then in person. Let’s call that the best. How do you deal with not having that? Scott: All the claims people make about serendipity, you’ll lose all the serendipity of meeting people in the hallway or — you can replicate all that. That’s what the group chat rooms are for where you jump in and you’re bored and you see all the other people who are procrastinating on something. You don’t see them but you can chat with them. There’s randomness and surprise that can happen in any group situation.  And all the one-on-one direct, more intimate communication, you have now fifty different tools to do that. You can send someone a private text message. “Hey, it seemed like you were upset in that meeting, should we talk?” Or you can make a Skype call. You have all of these tools to make the equivalent of what I would do at Microsoft, which is to go down to someone’s office and say “Hey, can I talk to you?” and close the door. Matt: What about when that trust gets broken [and] someone doesn’t follow up on what they say they’re going to do? How does your approach there vary when you were an in-person manager versus being a distributed one? Scott: I really have become a universalist about this, that as the manager — not even the manager — as a person, if someone has made a commitment to me and they’re not honoring it, part of my first thing to do is check in. “Hey, how’s it going, are you still on track for this thing on Friday?” I’m just checking, is my sense of the world in line with your sense of the world? If you do that periodically, especially when you don’t see them posting on Slack or giving any visible — you have no passive indicators that they’re following up on this… Matt: So is quietness a warning flag? Scott: It is a warning. And this is one of the things that I learned from you about Automattic was that if you don’t make your work visible it’s invisible. No one can see it. And if you’re not over — what feels at first like over-sharing — or making sure that your code commits show up in the team channel, [or] whatever you’ve agreed on, then that puts someone who is the manager and the responsibility now going, “Well that person’s been quiet for four days, I have to reach out.” So my first thing is just to check in. Do we still have the same expectations and view of the world? Yes. That sets me up then to come back two days later and go “Hey, we talked a couple days ago, we have a problem here because if you don’t get this done then Sally can’t get her thing done and now it’s going to cascade. So what’s going on?” 90 percent of the time, there is a reason. “Oh, this other issue came up that was more important, I forgot to mention it to you.” I’m like, “OK, great, now I understand, I can recalibrate.” But someone has to be that check-in maintainer that is driven by whoever is in the leadership role. The hard part is when you check in on someone and they keep — there’s something broken still. They’re not getting their work done, they’re frustrated —   Matt: Or there are broken things in the past. It was due on Friday and now it’s Tuesday. Scott: Right. You really want to avoid having deep, personal conflict conversations over text. Matt: Why? It seems so efficient. Scott: It’s efficient until it’s only making things worse. Matt: Ping, Berkun.  Scott: [laughs] It’s what I mentioned before about what you lose, that you don’t get the nuance that is so important to empathizing and understanding what someone is trying to say. And if I have an employee who [has] some issue that’s going on that’s personal that’s got nothing to do with work, they’re less likely to type that in.  But if I can get them on the phone and they hear my voice, and I can offer them my true empathy for — “I want you to do well, my job is to see you do well.” They get that empathy. Our brains respond to that more directly through voice and eye contact and facial expression. They’re more likely to respond back and share a little bit more about what’s really going on, which could turn out to be something simple, that the way that I assign work or the way that I make decisions bothers them in some way, but I didn’t know that. And they were afraid to offer that to me before. Matt: So you created that safe space for that to be communicated. Scott: Yes. I also think that even if you don’t agree with my point about intimacy, I think that every medium has strengths and weaknesses. And just by switching the medium it changes now what the strengths and weaknesses are going to be. To switch from Slack to SMS, although they both seem like text, there are subtle differences in the way people think and translate what’s in their head into communication. And so whenever I am stuck, I will always try to — and I feel like I don’t really know what’s going on here — try to switch the medium. The one that I always feel is the go-to one if I’m confused is voice. And often it’s faster. Matt: I think that’s great advice and it’s a cool feature of the new tools, like Slack. They have audio built in so you can initiate a call right there.  Scott: I have this experience with my friends. We’ll be going back and forth on SMS on something we’re not agreeing about and I know from all my experience at Automattic, I know that sometimes a 30-second phone call —  Matt: Would fix everything. Scott: Instead of a 20-minute — yes, we are asynchronous, I’m half watching TV while I’m doing it. But it is 20 minutes of time spent arguing about something that’s a nuance that would be completely obvious if we spoke on the phone for 30 seconds. Matt: It was interesting, we just had a leadership summit at Automattic. It was a training one, and we decided that the focus for the week would actually be feedback. And in my mind going in, it was more about how to give good feedback, some of what we just talked about. But the facilitators, who were quite good, ended up focusing probably the bulk of it on receiving feedback. Let’s say you’re on the other side of things and you’re getting some feedback over text or something like that, what have you found works well or poorly for that? Scott: I think that you have to start from separating out your personal identity with the work that you’ve done.  Matt: Hmm. What does that mean?  Scott: Well I’m a writer, so that’s the easiest place to start. I’m a writer, I write books. And people write reviews of books and a lot of them are really mean. Making Things Happen has a two star review on Amazon where someone says it was about as useful as a piece of toilet paper or something like that. Matt: By the way, toilet paper is super useful. Scott: It is super useful. [laughter] It’s all context-dependent though, right? Matt: It’s interesting though, every author I know has this where at some point, even if they know they shouldn’t, they’ve read the bad reviews and they can usually quote it word for word. Scott: Yeah. Oh yeah. Matt: But maybe you can also quote a really good review but they typically don’t have that same vividness to the probably 10 times more good reviews that it’s gotten. Scott: Yeah. I read every review.  Matt: Yeah? Scott: I think every review… not all the GoodReads ones but every Amazon review, every magazine review, and I feel like that’s part of my job. So I write a book and I do work knowing that there are going to be people who have valid criticisms of what I have made. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that what I did was bad, it just means that there’s many ways to decide what good is. That’s part of the job.  And I feel like that’s part of the job as a manager, that’s part of the job as a developer, that’s part of the job as a designer. You are making stuff and putting it out into the world. That’s what I mean by splitting out my personal identity as Scott from “I made some thing that someone might not like”, or in the management case, “I made a decision that someone really is upset about.”  Matt: So if I were to rephrase that — you created something that someone thought was worthy of two stars but that does not mean you, Scott Berkun, are a two-star person. Scott:  Correct. I might be a two-star person but not just because of —  Matt: Of this one review. Scott: Right. Not just because of that book that I wrote or a thing that I did. Matt: Or a thousand two-star reviews, ya know? Scott: Sure, yeah. Matt: That sounds hard though. You even started with saying, “I am a writer.” Scott: That’s why feedback is hard because we, especially people who are passionate about their work, they don’t have much psychological separation between their identity as a worker and their identity as a human being, and that is a kind of maturity that you need to have.  The helpful thing [is], I have a curious mind to ask clarifying questions. I’m not going to defend anything. I’m going to run with the assumption that they are correct. There’s something flawed in the decision that I made. But I have to be an investigator now. I have to — “OK, when you say this, do you mean that or that? When you say that you thought the decision was unfair, did you mean it was unfair just to you or to the team or to — ” I have to go into that —   Matt: That’s a tough one because it can feel aggressive. Scott: Yes. Matt: Because on the receiving end it’s like, “Oh I’m doing all this extra work to justify my feedback I’m giving you.” Scott: Yes. I think you’re pointing out how much trust is required to be a good leader, that I have to somehow convince someone who thinks I have done a lousy job that I genuinely want to learn more about why they feel that way and how they think about it. They have to trust me and I have to have earned that trust, that they’re willing to make themselves vulnerable and telling me more about this very uncomfortable thing. Matt: So how do you build trust besides giving it? Or is that the only way? Scott: The last therapist that I saw, she said that that’s the only way. [laughter]  Matt: Oh!  Scott: She told me and my wife, we were in marriage counseling, that that is the way. If you want to trust someone, the only way to do that is to give them something that you’re entirely sure you should trust them with. There’s no other way. Matt: Hmm. That’s powerful and terrifying and everything all at the same time. Scott: It is, it is. But if I have a dog and I need someone to watch it and you’re the only friend I have around — I’m not sure how good you are with dogs, I can’t half-have you watch the dog. Like, either you’re going to watch the dog or you’re not. Or either I’m going to let you cook a meal for me or not. Or I’m going to let you drive my car or not. There’s no — you can do things to insure and mitigate the dangers but either I am trusting you to do something or I am not. Matt: I will say also that’s something I learned a lot when you joined because as one of the first middle managers, it was a lot of letting go for me. Scott: Mhm. Matt: The book is so interesting, especially looking back at it now, because it was a vignette in time and so much has changed since then. In fact, some things in the book quite embarrass me now. I was like, wow, I can’t believe we did that or like, we were so early in our journey in a lot of ways that the company in a ton of ways is unrecognizable in a way I think is really positive.  You mentioned earlier that people still ask you about the book, you still get questions about it, so I guess people are still reading it, which is cool. How have those questions changed or what have you seen as the things that you look back and are like, “Oh, I’m glad that that’s better now,” or that we know more now? Scott: I get asked a fair amount about the genderedness of my point of view. And it’s a regret. Matt: I think it’s also a mistake I made when creating that team. Scott: Well, maybe. That’s for you to —  [laughter] I know that — I thought about it in writing the book and I knew the culture of our team was a particular way because of its makeup. I should have put that in some kind of context and I didn’t. And part of that was — the book was supposed to be this insider view and I don’t do that much context-setting about these wider issues in not just tech culture but culture at large. I totally understand that perception and I’ve tried to explain it. I don’t think that was an accurate reflection of the whole company. I was trying to reflect what was going on in my team and I didn’t do enough to set that in some kind of context. I regret that. But people ask me about the book because they’re switching to a remote company or they’re thinking about going to work for a remote company and they want to understand [what it’s] like. A lot of my answer is I don’t think remote work is that big a deal. I don’t understand why people obsess about it. I was at the gym today walking around the gym, I see people who are on their phones, people who are talking to their friends, they’re not necessarily doing remote work, they’re doing remote interaction with other people.  Remote is such a part of our culture now. Anytime you’re on your phone, interacting with another person through a screen, and it could be an iPad or a laptop, you’re doing remote work. People do remote work at their non-remote jobs all the time and in some cases it’s 50 or 60 percent of their time at work.  Matt: They’re not always talking to people presently, they’re often chatting or emailing with them. Scott: Exactly, yeah. Matt: They just happen to be in the same building. Scott: Just email alone, ask people how much time of [their] day is spent on email. Guess what, that’s remote work. Remote work! But somehow there is this phobia and stigma around it that is really still strange to me. There’s this fear of it being this completely different way to work. Now it could be if you took a centralized team and one day just said everyone you’re going to go to different countries on the planet, that would be a radical difference because people’s lives would change. But in terms of how work gets done, we’re already remote workers. Everybody.  If you do email, if you’re on the — you send text messages, Skype meetings, Zoom calls — to me it’s all remote work. And I try to tell people that and they still think there’s some other magical secret. And I’m like, no, I don’t think your problem with remote work is about the remoteness of it. Your problem with remote work is probably you don’t trust your team, your boss is a micromanager, you don’t have clear roles, you don’t have a good way to define who does what projects or to track them. And that’s got nothing to do with remoteness, that’s just basic competence as a team.  Matt: I think part of it is it’s tied in with a bunch of other things. I like to say any organization over 25 or 50 is distributed already, they’re just maybe not conscious of it. But people, when they hear remote, they also think “Oh I’m working from home.” And their context of what they do at home is very different from what they do at work and sometimes it’s hard to bridge that. Like, how could I work at home with my cat bugging me all the time, or my kids knocking on the door and wanting to play? So that all gets bundled in with some of that. And some of those are real challenges. Scott: Sure. Part of the stigma around this topic, it’s there is a totality to it that people feel that somehow they’re going to be forced to do things they don’t want to do. I have friends who commute to work and it takes them an hour and a half to go each way to work. I would never do that. There are so many different styles and formats and the demands on you as a person, what you have to wear as a dress code — No job is perfect for everybody. And so I’m an advocate for remote work, I think there are so many advantages to it, but I would never say that everyone is going to love working remotely all the time. I know this is true at Automattic, that some people join and after they’re there for six months — or any distributed company — they discover some things about their own needs they didn’t know before. They need more social interaction, they need more this or that. Matt: Yeah. In-office work bundles a lot of things and for many people it also becomes, like you said, part of social — people you get lunch with everyday. It’s your connections outside of your normal circles. It’s maybe, depending on where you work, who you play volleyball with or who you exercise with or all these number of things. I think that’s actually one way that companies draw people in quite a bit. I frequently give the advice when someone joins to get some hobbies, go to some meetup groups, find some things where you can interact with other homo sapiens outside of this remote, computer-mediated interactions.  Scott: Yeah. Matt: The people who often have the most trouble with it are [the ones] where it’s their first job out of college. Scott: Interesting. Matt: You probably remember some of this. You wind up with this thing where someone is not being as productive after a little while and you’re like — I mean it’s a little silly but like, “Are you leaving the house?” [laughter] “Are you showering in the morning, are you eating things other than pizza?” You do need a level of discipline and an approach to healthy habits. Scott: That is true. Matt: Another key point and a prominent feature in the book and your experience at Automattic that you helped create was meetups. So we’re distributed, why do we need to get together? Scott: That’s a bigger version of the voice comment that I said before about how our brains have old programming, we respond in certain ways regarding intimacy by being around people. Facial expression, body language, sharing a meal together. Matt: Breaking bread, yeah. Scott: Breaking bread, yeah, there’s a real power to that that you can’t quite replicate it, not in the same way. And so the meetup thing was something that you offered as a policy. It just so happened that me and my team decided to be the — [laughs] Matt: To really take off on it. Scott: To run with it. But I thought it made total sense to me, that at least a couple times a year, get everyone in a room together, and then we could flip the way we work and we could work more like a traditional team and take on a bigger project where we all have to be working on the same thing together for two days.  There’s a different way you learn to work with each other when you have that kind of commitment. I think that helped us a lot as a team because then we’d go back to our regular style of working but now we just spent two days really working hard on something that stretched our relationship and our working styles in a very important way for us. Matt: How was your trust before and after those meetups? Scott: Probably better. This gets back to human psychology again. When you share a house with someone, you share a meal with someone, you trust someone to go get the groceries or pick up the car or do a dozen logistical things that happen to be required. It’s a little bit different than this person that you work with but it’s all through digital and virtual stuff. And I don’t know that a team needed to meet up as often as we did. We probably met three times a year and then there’d always be the grand meetups. That’d be the fourth, but we all really enjoyed it and we were all mostly — we didn’t have kids or families so it just fit our team style for the most part. That would change more as the team got bigger.  Matt: I think this is probably an independent variable from being distributed or not but I’m a big believer in it, that if you give teams autonomy to try things out, hopefully the best practices then spread organically. And then occasionally you might come down from on high and say okay, everyone must do this.  Actually the last time I remember that was with Slack because we had portions of the company on IRC and Slack and the network effects of having everyone on the same communication tool was too big, too important to let that be too balkanized. But the initial adoption of Slack was just on a team here or there.  Scott: Yeah, that’s smart how you’ve managed that. I think the autonomy is really important to creative people and not in a superficial way. I think that their tools are so important. A big corporation that hires programmers and tells them you have to use this old computer or something, that’s a lack of respect for what you hired them to do. They’re going to be really tuned in to what tools are going to make them most efficient. Continuing to have that flexibility as Automattic has grown — that’s a cool thing. A lot of companies struggle with that as they grow. Matt: One thing that comes up a lot is people not sure how to do — is like, “OK. my team is in five different countries, how do we brainstorm? How do we do that sort of creative frisson that seems much easier to spark when you’re in person and have that white board on the wall?” Scott: For me, I didn’t struggle with that that much. I felt that if I have good people, and there’s a clear goal, then there will be an abundance of fodder. As long as stuff is being offered, as long as there’s that loop of feedback: idea, opinion, critique, new idea. You’re doing above the bar for most teams at most organizations. Matt: Similar to one of your earlier answers that maybe it’s not as big a deal as people worry about. Scott: I don’t think so. Matt: So they should just try it.  Scott: I think they should try it. But again the things I mentioned are not common. Talented people? Not common. People who are comfortable offering an idea and getting feedback on it? Not that common. People who are good at giving critique? Those kind of conversations? Most organizations don’t do that well. That’s really the problem to me. And no tool is going to solve that. It’s these other factors that are harder to deal with and probably have a lot to do with you as the boss.  Matt: I’m a new manager at a distributed company. What should I do every day? Scott: Lurk where your team communicates. Just lurk, just hang out. Spend an hour not jumping in. It’s very easy to jump in. Just observe. Because you may observe the team is just fine without you jumping in. Matt: And then do you stack something on top of that later? Scott: The thing that’s coming to mind is whatever feedback loop you have with each individual person on your team — and there is a set of questions that I developed. It’s in the book. I think the four questions were: what’s going well, what could be going better, what do you want me to do more of, and what do you want me to do less of as a manager? That’s how very one-on-one conversation I’d have — which would be like a half an hour, whatever, once a month or so — would be framed in those four questions.  Matt: Twenty years from now what percentage of jobs do you think will be distributed? Scott: Well, so I spent a fair amount of time, not recently, with some of these statistics because I get asked a lot and it’s weird how they measure these things. This will be my way that I dodge the question is to talk about survey design instead. Matt: Telecommute. Scott: A lot of the surveys are designed, they ask the question in the sense of you being a hundred percent remote or days where you’re a hundred percent remote. So it’s really weird because there are some companies that have liberal policies for you taking one day a week to telecommute. Is that remote work? Well it is but how does that fit into a percentage, like what you’re asking? It’s a weird thing. Matt: We can make our own definition here. If you were to pick an integer that was a percentage and let’s say people who work not in an office the vast majority of the time, the plurality of the time… Scott: Yeah I think all the numbers will go up, to cut to the chase. I think it has to. The tools — I’ve already made the joke that most people are already doing remote work even though they don’t call it that. That’s just continued to grow. The tools will get better and better and all the things that can be done digitally, which is the cliff to get over, the curve to get over before you can do it on your phone or your tablet, will continue to grow as technology gets better. Matt: So a hundred percent? Wow.  Scott: Well it can’t be a hundred percent because you don’t want your brain surgeon working remotely or your —   Matt: There was famously the doctor that wheeled in on one of these iPads-on-a-wheel thing and delivered a terminal diagnosis and the person was upset. Scott: Yeah. I see. Yeah that’s a tricky one. That’s a whole other case though where —   Matt: It’s a good chance to switch mediums. Scott: Yes, that is a good chance to switch mediums. Someone else should’ve given the diagnosis I think. Yeah. But I’m very positive just because I think that more worker autonomy just makes for better work. I really believe that. Matt: Just pick a number off the top of your head. Scott: What do you think, this is five percent now? Of jobs that are distributed? Matt: Sure. Scott: I don’t know, ten percent? I don’t know, twice that, maybe three times that.  Matt: So somewhere like 25 to 35 percent? Scott: Yeah. I think it’d be. And that’s enough for it to be normal. Matt: All right, we’ll get you on Episode 15,000 of the podcast and we can check it out. Scott: [laughs] Reserve my slot for that. Matt: Where can people find you if they want to hear more? Scott: I am ScottBerkun.com and I’m @Berkun on Twitter. Matt: Scott, it’s always inspiring. Thank you so much for talking with me. Scott: Thanks for having me. Matt: That was Scott Berkun. His latest book is The Dance of the Possible: The Mostly Honest Completely Irreverent Guide to Creativity. You can find him at scottberkun.com.  Thank you so much for joining us and see you next time.

Cate Huston, Head of Developer Experience at Automattic, leads the conversation on building robust distributed engineering teams. She shares insights on what makes engineers thrive in remote settings and the vital role of structured routines for productivity. Cate explores key traits to look for when hiring, such as adaptability and openness to feedback. Additionally, she emphasizes the significance of fostering team cohesion through effective communication and supportive cultures that promote self-awareness. Her experiences as a digital nomad add a unique perspective to these essential topics.

Leadership coach Leo Widrich, co-founder of Buffer, discusses emotional wellness and healthy habits for distributed workers. Topics include building resilience, avoiding the 'loneliness spiral,' finding balance between isolation and disconnection, and the importance of support and community.

Read more about John Maeda in “Helping Creativity Happen from a Distance.” Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. John Maeda has spent the last three years leading Automattic’s design team, and on this episode of the Distributed podcast, he reflects on what he’s learned with our host, Matt Mullenweg. John shares how to facilitate collaborative creativity across a distributed team, explains why smart managers blog (and vlog) prolifically, and discusses how giving and receiving feedback with a spirit of gratitude, humility, and empathy is essential for managers, especially in a distributed context.  The full episode transcript is below. *** MATT MULLENWEG: What did real-time remote collaboration look like 30 years ago, in the primitive era before Slack and Zoom? My guest on this episode of the Distributed podcast knows, because he was there.  Designer, author, and Automattician John Maeda spent the latter half of the 90s pioneering a new field called computational design at the MIT Media Lab, a legendary sandbox for researchers who wanted to explore and create the future of tech. Computational design was a bold new approach that applied design principles to the creation of hardware, software, and computer networks, and John helped define it from the beginning. By 1999, John had developed enough of a reputation for Esquire magazine to name him one of the 21 most important people of the 21st century. Wired magazine once said that “Maeda is to design what Warren Buffett is to finance.”  My company, Automattic, has been lucky to have John working with us for the last few years, and he will be moving to Publicis soon. He’s been leading a team of 70 designers scattered all over the world, and before he left, I wanted to talk to him about what that’s like, so I’m thrilled that he’s able to join me for a discussion about creative collaboration at a distance.  We are here today with John Maeda, who leads what might be the largest all-distributed design teams, or at least that we know of. He is the author of three books, The Laws of Simplicity, which is actually what introduced me to John’s work, Creative Code, and Redesigning Leadership. And I believe there is a fourth book on the way, is that correct? JOHN MAEDA: There is. It’s How To Speak Machine. And thanks for having me on. MATT: Oh, no problem. So your title is Global Head of Computational Design & Inclusion. JOHN: Mhm, mhm. MATT: Computational design might be a concept that not that many people are familiar with as well. Tell us about that. JOHN: Well actually, people ask me about that. That’s why I thought that How To Speak Machine is the first primer on that because when we think about the value of design right now, because of the technologies we use today, it isn’t a picture, it isn’t a clever drawing. If it’s computational, if it’s driven by code, or it’s tied to code, it can achieve scale, it can achieve behavior, it can be interactive.  If you think of an early computational design system, that would be WordPress. It’s interactive, I can use it as a tool, it’s not like a poster in the MoMA collection, but it’s a usable system that is running with computation. It never gets tired. Want to add a post again? Okay. Want to add another post? Okay.  So the computational system never gets tired. Whereas we’re in a room with a beautiful wooden table. This table, if we — we wouldn’t want to hurt this table, we don’t own this table, I know — but if we kept hitting at it, it would eventually fracture. It has physical laws. But computational systems behave differently because they are built out of programs. MATT: Where do humans fit into this? JOHN: Originally humans and computers interacted, like Hiroshi Ishii’s human-computer interface world. MATT: Yeah. JOHN: But now computers and computers interact, as you well know. They’re hanging out together without us, especially with AI. They’re hanging out. Like, “What do you got?” “I got this” or “I got that” “Well give me some of that.” So —  MATT: I love the concept of the AIs that train against themselves.  JOHN: Oh those are really cool. MATT: Like the Alpha Go, [or] the other things where they have this adversarial learning against itself. So it can play hundreds of millions of games in a day. JOHN: That concept you described used to be science fiction but now, because of the resources we have available to us by the cloud or everything we can buy now, that’s a normal thing. If our raw material has changed then design should have changed too vis-a-vis computer-based systems. MATT: And has it? JOHN: It’s trying to. That’s the one thing I’ve realized is so hard — this is across the tech ecosystem — is that there are a lot of designers who came from the past. And so when we look in this room, the person who designed the texture on that wall over there, that’s a kind of design, but it’s less relevant to the design of a new release of a new feature that needs something that actually has to ship right now.  And the distance between that design and a design that once it’s shipped now has to iterate and improve at a rapid velocity — that’s a different kind of design. I think most of the design, maybe over 90%, is stuck in the old design, not in computational design. So that’s why I wanted to highlight that when I joined your merry band.  MATT: Let’s say someone is listening to this, a younger person who is not currently in design and wants to go into it, and wants to be in this kind of present or future you’re describing. What should they work on? JOHN: They should use WordPress. [laughter] MATT: Okay, so that’s a good start. JOHN: No, no actually not in that way. I have been using WordPress intensely, over two years now, getting on three, and it has really reminded me how the internet works. It has exposed the messiness of how information is transmitted, how it’s displayed on multiple platforms.  It’s like people who really love WordPress will hate hearing this but it’s kind of like infants, for them to walk, there is this baby walker thing, I’m not sure if it’s legal anymore, but there’s this thing where the baby can stand up in this walker thing and they can move, they can move around the room and it’s like, “Wow the baby is moving around.” MATT: It’s like a little circular thing with wheels? JOHN: A circular thing with wheels on the bottom, exactly. MATT: I haven’t seen one of those recently but I know what you’re talking about.  JOHN: They must be illegal now for some dangerous reason. But to me it’s been like a baby walker because — I know a lot of the high tech stuff but I lost sense of the basics in many ways.  MATT: What are some of those basics that people should be familiar with? JOHN: The basics are, first of all, collaboration. MATT: That’s not a basic. That’s hard! JOHN: Well I mean that’s a basic that comes — if you build software yourself you don’t have to collaborate, right? But by having a distributed system you have to collaborate. So just to get in touch with that, that’s been great. MATT: What makes you good at collaboration? JOHN: Listening. I think it’s the number one important thing is listening. What is the saying, two ears, one mouth? So two-to-one? [laughs]  MATT: But everyone can’t do that at the same time. JOHN: Oh yeah.  MATT: Sometimes it’s going to be impossible? JOHN: Yeah. The collaboration thing is key, the listening part. The second thing is being technically facile. Being able to write poetry in code. I think for a long time, because I was in the classical design world where coding is bad, like coming back into, via Kleiner Perkins and eBay and Automattic, I’m like, “Oh, coding is good.” And why is it good? It’s because you have agency. What does “creative” mean? It means I’m creating. And if you can code you can do so many things.  So collaboration is important and to be able to make code is great. The thing I love is how I think of what I’ve learned with WordPress — it’s like Lego. And people will say, “Oh it’s just Lego, it’s not like real wood, real marble, real concrete, it’s just Lego.” But in this world of having an idea, an MVP or an MLVP, you want Lego to be able to make ideas spun up quickly.  MATT: You brought it full circle. You said community-made platforms win or lose. Some people say that WordPress is not the best CMS, but it does have one of the largest communities and has been the most successful. JOHN: Yeah. MATT: You also said that the first thing that designers need to know is collaboration.  JOHN: Yes. MATT: So it came to people. JOHN: Yeah. MATT: As we said in the intro, you lead definitely one of the larger all-distributed design teams. So if collaboration is important for design and you can’t have everyone in the same room around a whiteboard, what do you do? What are the challenges? And what are some of the benefits? JOHN: You just reminded me how in the early 2000s or late ’90s I had made this system called Design By Numbers, and it was a system to teach anyone how to code. It was very limited. You could only draw in a 100 by 100 square in black and white. Super constrained system, super easy to teach anyone computation. And then two people on the research team, Casey Reas and Ben Fry, who were involved with this system, said, “I think this system should be less constrained. It should be color. And why is it limited to 100 by 100?”  And so they built this system called Processing and they did two things. The first is they built a community center portal around it and the second thing they did was they open-sourced it. And at the time I’m like, “That’s never going to take off. That’s just sort of a — what is this? It’s never going to happen. You should be working on something else.” And that’s why I never really believe anything I say because I could be wrong. I was so glad they didn’t listen to me and they went off and made this Processing thing. And I think there’s a gazillion books about it, there’s communities around it. MATT: It’s extremely popular, yes. JOHN: I had to learn from them the power of community because I spent most of my career making software by myself. Everything I made by myself, I designed every book by myself because that’s what I thought people did. The great creators made things by themselves. MATT: Which is also amazing because, as you know, so many great artists had workshops, architects… JOHN:  I know, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that Michelangelo didn’t paint all those.  MATT: Leonardo da Vinci…  JOHN: I didn’t know that. MATT: Raphael. Yeah. JOHN: Well, you know, I grew up with —   MATT: Today, Jeff Koons. JOHN: — my family had no education, we had no books, there wasn’t internet, I had no idea. MATT: The myth of a solo creator might be one of the most corrosive to creativity in general actually. JOHN: Ohh totally. Oh my gosh. I almost died doing that. I got sick, overworked, I was in the hospital for three weeks. I went over the line, you know? MATT: You told me about that before to caution me against it. JOHN: Oh yeah, it happens, it happens. It goes past…  MATT: I appreciate those cautionary tales. It’s worth noting on this podcast itself is not a solo endeavor.   JOHN: I agree 100% and I think that the solo creator myth is something that I strive to break through sharing my own embarrassing failures around this. And then when working with teams the number one important thing that I found is respect. MATT: In working together over these past few years you seem to exhibit an incredible amount of empathy, which is also important for design. Maybe we’ll add that to the list. Or I’ll put it on my list, you don’t have to put it on yours. How do you balance that empathy with that, [so you’re] able to get through these tough things? JOHN: One of my favorite artworks I’ve made in my life — I don’t have many things I like that I did, but I was in a meeting at MIT where I was having this feeling of, “Whoa, this is feeling really ugh, you know?” I calligraphed on a piece of paper “thicker skin” 75 times. And it’s entitled “Thicker Skin 75 Times.” And it was sold at an auction for charity for UNICEF in Paris. But it’s my proudest piece of artwork because all of my feeling went into that simple drawing to remind myself that it really isn’t about them, it’s about me: Can I have thicker skin? MATT: It’s a powerful concept. JOHN: Yes. But it hurts still. It hurts. If there is someone that you really respect and doesn’t respect you, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Does it hurt? Of course. Every time it hurts. Like, “Oh wow.” You let someone down and you don’t forget it. MATT: But does that close you off to the full range of human emotions? JOHN: That’s more a combination of thicker skin and gratitude. MATT: Gratitude, okay, that’s one we haven’t talked about yet. JOHN: Yes, thicker skin is there if you’re feeling bad and then the gratitude is there because it’s like, “This is an awesome world, like, this is so amazing.” Or you’ll feel gratitude for someone in your past and that activates something good in you. I always think about how I would not be where I am today if it wasn’t for my 11th grade high school chemistry teacher, Mr. Wakefield, who took an interest in me as being the number two smart kid in his class.  The number one kid was so much smarter but came from a really good background whereas I came from a background where I knew nothing. My parents had no education, we didn’t know what the future should be like. I was working after school at my parents’ shop, on the weekends. I hated summers because I had to work there all the time. And so Mr. Wakefield said to me, “You want to go to a good school, you’ve got to have stuff on your application that makes you credible.” MATT: The extracurriculars? JOHN: And I was like, “What’s that?” So he said, “We’ll make a science club,” and whatever, so we did that. And then he said, “You need to take a class at the local university over the summer.” And I said, “Oh my parents won’t let me do that because I have to work at the store.” And then Mr. Wakefield came to the store on Saturday, on the weekend, to talk to my parents.  MATT: Wow. JOHN: He didn’t have to do that. He was a retired Boeing engineer, he never would venture into the Chinatown area. I mean he didn’t quite fit the whole thing. [laughs] He came and talked to my parents and said, “You want your son to go to a great university, let him take the summer off and do this, give it to him.” And they did.  MATT: And they did. What did you study that summer? JOHN: Organic chemistry. I loved chemistry. I was going to become a chemist. I was almost going to be — at MIT the only class I didn’t fail out of in the first year — it was a really bad year — was solid state chemistry. I got one of these rainbow stickers on my tests. Oh it’s the one moment of “Ohh, I’m not an imposter. Should I be here?” I got the golden sticker that one time. I think of Mr. Wakefield, I think of other people like that who gave me a chance and I feel gratitude towards them. And then it gets easy, like how can I serve you, how can I help you? It’s easier. MATT: One area we didn’t fully cover was that chemistry for teams or the collaboration for design teams. In a remote setting does anything stand out? JOHN: Oh my gosh, so this is all about distributed collaboration so I know — exchanges around commentary on code and ASCII text, etcetera, some images, some pull request is initiated, it goes through the shipping — I think of GitHub or GitLab or any of these systems, like a big ship construction site where the ship is going through this gigantic tunnel about to launch out there. For developers it is highly developed but for designers it’s not developed. That’s why I think things like Figma are so popular because they closely emulate high-network collaborative spaces that remove the abstraction between storage and actual application. [It’s] super reliable, it runs fast and is social to the extent that it’s not actually annoying like Slack can be sometimes. [laughs] MATT: Why can Slack be annoying? JOHN: Slack? Oh my gosh. Slack can be annoying for so many reasons. And some people say to me, oh well you’re not Gen Z or Millennial so you don’t get it. I’m sorry, but I think I have been able to Slack with the best of them.  MATT: I’d say you’re a pretty big Slacker. JOHN: I know, I try. I try to be a good Slacker. But the feeling I have around a system like Slack is that it moves things so quickly that you can’t think fast enough. And a quanta is so small, the message size is so small. And if the organization is a six-person start up — I think Slack is fantastic, but anything larger — it isn’t about the message, it’s about the feeling. Like, how are you feeling for yourself as a leader of all these people? You need to get a sense of how they feel. And from a Slack instance you can’t get that sense of feeling unless someone is really good at choosing the right emoji, you have no idea, is this the real reaction? You can’t tell.  MATT: I know creative work — I think creative work requires uninterrupted periods of time, of focus. JOHN: That’s a good hypothesis. I think you’re right. Yes, you’re right because one of my favorite metaphors is by the late Gordon MacKenzie, and it’s about how he draws a graph — a graph across the — a horizontal line, and then the majority of the line is called “making milk time,” and the end point of the line is “expressing the milk.”  So a cow is sitting there eating, and you’re like, “Come on, cow, give me milk. Give me milk, cow, give me milk.” And then, “Where’s the milk, cow?” And the cow is just sitting there, chewing the grass. And it’s like, “This cow is not working.” But actually the cow is making the milk but the cow is only rewarded when they express the milk. The example is about how creative work takes eating-grass time and sitting in the sun, otherwise all you get is barely made milk. MATT: And you’re leading 75-80 people around the world, 24/7.  JOHN: Mhm. MATT: How do you find that making-milk time? JOHN: Because we’re distributed and because we have all kinds of teams that work with designers, I think it’s up to the local zone of leadership to be able to create that time. The best that I can do is a round robin, asking, “What’s up, what are you doing, what are you doing outside of work?” And then someone will say to me, “But that’s not work.” And I’ll say, “It’s your work as a creative person to express yourself.” So one thing I’m really happy about is our blog, Automatic.design. You may remember in the beginning it was hard to get off the ground because some designers felt like, “Well why am I going to blog? What is the point of blogging? What’s that for?” And my point is blogging is good for you. It’s mental health, it’s expression, it’s sharing your process with the world. And when you relate to the world, your standard of quality floats to that value of the world. It’s a market economy of ideas and by putting ourselves out there, you become relevant. MATT: I’ve noticed, talking about that low-bandwidth communication of text, downsize to Slack. JOHN: Yeah. MATT: You internally and now externally are on your YouTube channel. JOHN: I’m doing YouTube, I’m a YouTuber now. Oh my gosh, I love it. MATT: Yeah, you create a lot of these videos. JOHN: I do.  MATT: And I also perceive that you’ve literally created a lot of videos. You edit a lot, you insert emojis. JOHN: I make the whole — It is the classical “I make it by myself thank you very much.” [laughs]  MATT: Yes, so why are you using video to communicate?  JOHN: Oh my gosh. MATT: Internally as well. We have so many different tools. JOHN: Look at you. You’re a WordPress-world person, you’re speaking into a metal thing, holding it with your hand, you’re not typing, you’re audio casting. So you see the diversity of the ecosystem. So YouTube to me represents really what the younger generation has figured out, is [it’s] so much more convenient. MATT: Should managers at distributed companies or leaders learn video editing? JOHN: A thousand, thousand percent yes. Because editing skills are ways to communicate in the same way that blogging is, but be careful to add a closed-caption, subtitled track because that makes it even more inclusive for those who have problems understanding spoken English, or for a language barrier. MATT: One thing that’s cool, and actually one of the features I’m most excited about, is just launching. Our internal video player just launched —  JOHN: Oh yeah, congrats, yeah that was good. MATT:  — the speed thing. JOHN: That’s important. MATT: Which YouTube has had forever. So you can speed things up or slow them down. JOHN: Yes. MATT: I’ve found it’s interesting for meetings. What might be a synchronous status meeting that might take 15 minutes  — JOHN: Yeah, you could —   MATT: You can get through in ten minutes or eight minutes depending on your speed of processing. JOHN: Whoa. You can express it. MATT: Especially people who listen to the podcast, I imagine more than half, if not more, are listening to this sped up right now. JOHN: That is wild. MATT: So you actually train yourselves to be able to listen faster.  JOHN: Oh that’s so interesting. MATT: And I wonder if I can improve efficiency. JOHN: Well one thing I’m doing with the team around me is my direct reports, on Monday, and you don’t know this, but Monday what we do is I have a one-minute video requirement. On Monday you post your one-minute video and that’s your stand-up, but it’s async. And that way you can comment on the video. Any extra comment can happen by text. But you can also hear it in full fidelity how someone is experiencing their life and their work. MATT: That’s really interesting. JOHN: It’s an async stand-up. MATT: What are some other things you do in leading the team? I know you have a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday publishing schedule. JOHN: Yes I do, yes. MATT: Tell us about that and more.  JOHN: Okay. One thing I’m really excited about is learning the distributed universe and how hard it is to have a point of reference. If you work at a physical place, you walk in, you can tell the seasons, there is a Monday, there is a Friday. Monday feels so different than a Friday on-prem. So you lose your sense of gravity. There is that Sandra Bullock film — was it Gravity? Where she’s floating in outer space and it’s “Which way is up, which way is down?” So one thing that I developed after a lot of feedback — I love feedback — every negative or positive feedback I’ll share internally, just with everyone, because it’s easier that way. If people want to talk about me, they have already talked about me because I’ve shared it and it’s easy. But one of the feedback points I got was that I was posting or sharing too much information. And then I realized, well maybe it’s because I haven’t given it structure. So I gave it structure.  But then I realized that structure isn’t as good as time structure. Because time creates gravity in a distributed organization. So Monday’s post is about the external world, the external realities, Tuesday’s post is about business, and Wednesday’s post is about organization. And I limit myself to posting in that cadence. People expect Monday to be a certain thing, Tuesday, Wednesday.  The other practice I developed in the team around me is I borrowed a technique developed by Joel Califa, he’s a designer I used to mentor, but now these people who I mentored are like my teacher[s]. It’s a spreadsheet where everyone posts what they’re going to do that week and then they rate how that goal has been achieved during the week. It’s like an old-style Japanese office-memo thing. And the reason I use a Google Sheet and not a special tool is because everyone authenticates. There’s no “Hey can I get a login, can I get a login?” MATT: Yeah. At our company everyone has a Google account. JOHN: Yeah, and that Sheet is open to everyone in the company too. I love the idea of transparency that you brought into the Automattic culture or created with your team members over these years. And I think transparency is so important but clarity also is key. MATT: You said that you love feedback. Positive, negative, you love sharing it. JOHN: Yes, I do. It’s good. MATT: What do you think engenders a healthy culture? Does everyone on your team take that same approach? And how do you judge a healthy culture of feedback? JOHN: I’m laughing because the best feedback is delivered non-anonymously. MATT: I know you feel very strongly about that. JOHN: For me I feel strongly about this because when you deliver it non-anonymously you can understand it better. I have two favorite sayings and they’re too long so I can’t memorize them. But one of them is by Coach Pat Summitt, and paraphrasing, “When you’re able to give someone straight feedback you’re showing them the compliment that they will be able to take it.”  And so when people give me feedback, does it sting that I am no good at something? Yes. I’m like whoa, I thought I was good at that. And I might think they’re wrong. But then when they say how I didn’t achieve something I’m like, “No, you’re right, I could improve there.” If you get it anonymously you don’t know the smell or taste of it. It’s like if I gave you —   MATT: It’s missing context, for sure, yeah. JOHN: It’s missing — You have to fill in the rest of the story 80 percent. MATT: It also seems you can’t get any anonymous follow-up on it? JOHN: Well you can tell everyone “I got anonymous feedback, this is what I’m doing.” And then you give more power to anonymous people and those who actually give you the —  MATT: But you share all the feedback, anonymous or not, right? JOHN: I do, yes. And one of my proudest achievements is the anonymous feedback and the in-name feedback is just as bad. [laughter]  MATT: So people are comfortable saying it either way. JOHN: Right, right.  MATT: You also work a lot on inclusion. JOHN: Mhm. MATT: That’s from a position of privilege as well. JOHN: Absolutely and I —   MATT: You’re very powerful and you’re John Maeda.  JOHN: People think that I’m something. An octopus, like, whatever. But that’s why a lot of what I do is reiterate that I’m only as good as what I do now. MATT: How do you make people who might feel that they don’t have that privilege to give things to you directly, how do you make them comfortable with that?  JOHN: I haven’t cracked that one yet but it’s on my list of… how do I invite them into the fact that my only goal is to serve others and I cannot do that unless — think of all the user research. Unless I have high-fidelity user research, how am I going to improve? Maybe my goal is to center on that concept with more people that I do believe in agile development, I’m a computational system, organic, [laughter] and how am I going to iterate and improve if I don’t get really high-fidelity feedback?  Maybe I might become much more open to delegation of that. Because there are some people who feel that I’m in a privileged position and some people feel privileged enough to go straight with me. Like if you don’t feel comfortable with me, talk to them and I could just anoint that role —   MATT: But then you lose the fidelity. JOHN: I do. And then I also do recognize that there are those who will always feel something. And it’s often not about me, it’s someone like me that in their past [with whom] they had a bad experience. So I totally understand why there would be no reason that they feel that they could be candid with me, because something bad happened in the past. MATT: Are you also that candid with everyone you work with? JOHN: Am I that candid? It depends.  MATT: Can everyone handle that kind of raw —  JOHN: That’s the challenge of getting older for me. When I was younger, I would tell everyone everything I thought. Oh my gosh, people couldn’t stand me, for good reason. I mean it was okay, I forgive them. Actually I hope that they forgive me. I would just tell them what I think and I was direct all the time.  And then I realized wow, this is not working. This is not working. I believe in the “I’ll show you respect by telling you what I think.” But it’s like, “No, actually he doesn’t want to hear what I had to say. Whoops.” So I changed.  MATT: Why is it bad if people are doing the same to you, not giving you the direct feedback? JOHN: With people who I develop a strong working relationship with, then they are the ones who ask me, “Can I get your feedback.” MATT: So conversely they feel more comfortable with the raw feedback from you? JOHN: Yeah. And some instances, some people want that, some people can, quote, “handle it,” which means that they were privileged in some way where that became — where that’s doable. But there are some who just had a really difficult life that they just don’t want to handle that and it just hurts them in a way, it doesn’t help them. And so I’ve become much more conscious of “Huh, how do I adapt to what you need?” MATT: In design you are also overseeing everything that goes out to all of our users. JOHN: Mhm. MATT: Everything we’ve been saying about feedback is pretty universal. Is there anything specific to distributed [work] that you want to throw in there?  JOHN: In a distributed organization I think that the value of it is that you can now control your life differently. I know so many people [for whom] distributed work has been able to make them better parents, better children to their parents as caregivers. Them coming from that point of view is the beginning of recognizing that this is an amazing job to have. And do you enjoy that aspect of those jobs? Yes. Great. Now what kind of work are we doing and how can we safeguard that wonderful thing that you are able to do because of this paradigm.  That’s what interests me the most, is that it’s a really special thing to be able to work distributed, and if you can start from the respect of that versus the wonder of it, then you have hard conversations about, “Now what should we do with the work to safeguard that?” MATT: Tell me about your ideal work space. JOHN: My ideal work space — I’m still QWERTY, we’re talking typewriter-speak. How do you say the other one? MATT: Dvorak? JOHN: Thank you. I don’t know how to pronounce it. Dvorak. I love a Kinesis keyboard because it has helped me I think —   MATT: Those are the curved ones, right? JOHN: It’s the curved one. In my late twenties I had really bad RSI. It’s the way I hold my body, but that really helps. I like to have that nearby. I like it super quiet. I don’t like to put headphones on, it’s a bit constraining. MATT: Do you put music on? JOHN: No music, no music, but hopefully art around to distract me. MATT: Besides the Kinesis, any must-have equipment? I think you use a custom camera, right? JOHN: Oh my gosh, I have fallen in love with this new thing. You know how headset experimentation is so important for distributed? It’s almost like a hairstyle problem. I found that in-ear musician-quality microphone monitor headphones, they’re great because they —   MATT: Did you do the custom? JOHN: There is this memory tip cushion thing that you can get that is super comfortable, sound-isolating. For audio quality it’s fantastic.  MATT: That’s amazing. JOHN: I love good microphones. Podcast-quality microphones, the sound quality is so much better. I do love the Sennheiser headset for sound-isolation quality. Like, we can be talking and I’d be in the airport, and you’re like, I don’t hear anything. MATT: Oh yeah.  JOHN: That’s bizarre how well that works. MATT: Noise-cancelling not for you ears, for the mic. A noise-cancelling mic. JOHN: That’s bizarre how good that is. But I do always feel a little embarrassed wearing it. You have no problem being in a restaurant wearing it. [laughter] MATT: No, you look like you’re in a call center or something. JOHN: I can’t go there. You wear it all the — I can’t do that. Yeah. MATT: Zoom, Hangouts, Skype? What’s your go-to? JOHN: Oh my gosh I can’t stand all of them. I like audio-only if I can. I like phone, yeah.  MATT: Hmm. So you make phone calls? JOHN: I make phone calls, yeah. It feels good.  MATT: What’s your number-one tip for getting things done? JOHN: Is if you’re lucky to have a good assistant, and if you are less lucky, having any good to-do note system, they always work. So the competency of making a list, oh, so good. MATT: One thing I love about working with you is you’re go, go, go.  JOHN: Aww. MATT: What is your drive there? JOHN: My parents worked so hard all their lives. I think about my father. He’s 84 years old, he’s hunched over, he can’t stand up straight, because he was carrying so many heavy things all his life. My mother, because of the cold water involved in tofu — her hands — she can’t feel anything. They worked extraordinarily hard. They are an example that was set that tells me I should do more.  MATT: What are some of your habits that contribute to that, good and bad habits? JOHN: I’m not good at vacationing. As you know, it’s not my forte.  MATT: That was a goal for the year.  JOHN: You gave me feedback and I took it, and I was like, “Okay, I’ll do this vacation thing.” MATT: Although I think you worked the whole time. JOHN: I had to get stuff done. [laughter] But vacation, not good at. I don’t read enough. You read a lot. You’re always reading. I don’t read enough. MATT: You probably read all day. Do you mean books? JOHN: Books, books. I’m consuming information. But I want to get good at reading books. MATT: And finally, 20 years from now, what percentage of jobs do you think will be distributed? JOHN: I think for developers, I think it will become a norm. I think for whatever we think of for designers it will be 50/50. Fifty for designers who are doing much more of the traditional creative, emotional type of work that requires more high-bandwidth collaboration, but it’s going to be expensive, that work. But the other half is all going to be computational. MATT: Well, thank you so much, John. JOHN: Thank you. This was fun. MATT: That was John Maeda. You can follow him on Twitter at @johnmaeda. That’s J-O-H-N M-A-E-D-A.  Slack is a tool that’s so widely used it feels ubiquitous in the tech world. And when everyone uses a tool, sometimes it can be difficult to imagine how it might be improved, or how a different tool might be better. It’s a privilege to hear someone like John Maeda — someone who has spent much of his long career thinking about digital interfaces — dissect the technology and talk about the way that it works, and where it falls short. Hearing about the live-video-chat-meets-virtual-whiteboard tool John helped create in the 90s makes me think about how distributed design teams might use that today. It’s a great reminder that devices and interfaces can always be iterated on, which is both a great lesson from computational design and one of the great pleasures of building digital tools. John has a humble, thoughtful approach to distributed collaboration, and thinks about how humans operate as much as how computers do. When you’re working with people across the globe, sometimes the best collaborative tools are the oldest, like listening, gratitude, and empathy.  John’s time with Automattic will be coming to a close soon — he’s accepted an exciting new role with consulting firm Publicis Sapient — but I hope that his thoughtful and humble approach to distributed collaboration will live on in our design team, and I look forward to him contributing to Automattic as an adviser. Next time on the Distributed podcast, we’ll be talking with Leo Widrich. Leo helped build a successful distributed startup called Buffer, and was living the Bay Area dream. But he felt something was missing from his life, so he quit his job and turned to ancient wisdom and mindfulness to achieve emotional resilience. We’ll hear Leo’s story, and learn how distributed workers can avoid the psychological pitfalls that are unique to working remotely. Thanks for joining us. 

Zoe Harte, Head of HR at Upwork, and Han Yuan, Senior VP of Engineering, share insights on managing a hybrid workforce. Zoe discusses integrating full-time and freelance talent, emphasizing the importance of diversity and collaboration in global teams. Han highlights essential soft skills for engineers in a distributed environment, stressing effective communication and cultural sensitivity. They explore innovative strategies for remote hiring and mentorship, providing practical tips to thrive in today’s flexible work landscape.