Podcast
Distributed, with Matt Mullenweg
Hosted by Matt Mullenweg · EN
Matt Mullenweg, cofounder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, embarks on a journey to understand the future of work. Having built his own company with no offices and more than 1,300 employees in 76 countries, speaking 95 different languages, Mullenweg examines the benefits and challenges of distributed work and recruiting talented people around the globe.
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Episode 30: The Magic of Meetups
May 26, 202300:58:08Tap to summarizeOn this episode of Distributed, we dig into the good, the bad, and the karaoke-filled history of Automattic meetups. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, our annual Grand Meetup brought the entire company together for a week. The time spent together — along with team-specific meetups scattered throughout the year — helped us strengthen relationships with our colleagues located around the world. Now, as companies and workers grapple with returning to the office, it’s a perfect chance to consider in-person time as an important complement to the autonomy and flexibility of distributed work. We spoke with Automatticians about how to stay connected in a distributed work culture. You’ll hear from Toni Schneider, Automattic’s first CEO, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, Executive Director of the WordPress Project, and Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, along with a wide range of Automatticians. The full episode transcript is below and has been lightly edited for clarity. *** MATT MULLENWEG: Howdy howdy. This is Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress and the CEO of Automattic, and you are listening to the Distributed podcast, which is back after a – I’m embarrassed to say – 500 day hiatus, roughly. I wasn’t as drawn to do more Distributed episodes last year. One because I got super busy and, you know, 2022 I started running Tumblr directly and WordPress.com. So, things at work got pretty busy, but also just felt like everyone was doing it. Everyone had kind of figured out the remote and distributed thing. And it was going fine. So like, the reason I started the podcast was done so the purpose, the goal I set out to accomplish was completed. However, recently there’s been a lot of news about companies who are rolling back their employee flexibility and forcing people back into the office 2, 3, 4, 5 days a week. Sometimes, they might be doing this as a way to lay people off. It’s hard to tell the motivations of some of these executives. But some, I think, in good faith are saying that they were missing something when people weren’t getting together and that employees that joined during the pandemic maybe weren’t as productive as employees who joined prior. It got me thinking and I started to wonder if what they were missing was meetups. So there is something magic, some frisson that happens in person, that’s impossible to recreate. At Automattic, we just don’t think that needs to be 52 weeks a year. Just like a little salt makes the dish, getting together in person a few times a year is a key ingredient of Automattic’s culture. So I wanted to share with the world and podcast listeners who are now seeing this pop up after 500 days. How we do meetups at Automattic and why it’s so key. So, I tapped my colleague Chenda Ngak to gather some stories and best practices from Automatticians of how we do meetups. We’ll also put together some guides on the distributed.blog website, after this episode is up. But please get together. Seeing people is important. And without further ado, I’ll pass you over to the Chenda. CHENDA NGAK: Grand meetups at Automatic are the stuff of legends. We paused them because of the pandemic and have slowly restarted smaller meetups over the last year. Meetups have been an important tradition ever since the first meetup in 2006. Now, I’d never been to a grand meetup, so I wanted to hear what it was like from Automatticians who have attended. I started with Lori McLeese. She leads our global people team from Asheville, North Carolina. I couldn’t think of a better person to give me a crash course in meetups. She’s been at Automattic for a decade, and her team is connected to every Automattician around the world. LORI MCLEESE: So, the different types of meetups that Automattic are our Grand Meetup, which is when the whole company comes together. Unfortunately, we have not had an all company meetup since the end of 2019 because of the pandemic. However, when we were having them before that, it usually lasted about seven to eight days and we usually held them in September or October, and it was a week when the whole company could get together. We could learn from each other. We could do projects. We could hear amazing speakers, you know, spend time together, both as teams and with people that maybe you don’t work with on a normal basis and just have fun and build relationships. So, that’s one type of meetup. A second type of meet up is team meetups, which is very similar to the Grand Meetup, but on a much, much, much smaller scale. So, team meetups are usually anywhere from four to 10 people. The team actually decides where to go, what to do, what type of social activities they want to be involved in. And as a company, we give them a budget and then the teams make all that decision. And we ask people after their meetups to actually write a summary on our internal, we call it Meetomattic and it’s a P2 or a website where all the teams record experiences of their meetup and actually rate the location about whether it would be good for other teams to go. CHENDA NGAK: So, for those who don’t know, Lori is talking about an internal network of blogs called P2. The recaps on P2 are like a mini city guide with best restaurants, activities, the team’s itinerary for the week, and the average cost of throwing a meetup in cities around the world. LORI MCLEESE: And then a third type of meetup is a division meetup, and that’s when several teams within the division get together. And I would say that those depending on the division run from like 75 to maybe 200 people. So, it’s a little bit of a mash up between team and Grand Meetup. CHENDA NGAK: Why do you think that meetups are so important for our culture? LORI MCLEESE: While it’s great to work from home, work distributedly, work from anywhere, there is something missing when all you ever have is either text communication or perhaps even video communication and I think one of the best things about meetups is that that’s where spontaneity can occur. CHENDA NGAK: I wanna expand on that and see if we can talk a bit about what meetups mean for team morale and inclusion. LORI MCLEESE: For team morale, there is an excitement not only of being at the meetup, but also planning the meetup and talking about what do we want to do together? Whether that’s the work activities or the social activities, and learning about people’s preferences for inclusion. It’s also really important because we have a pre-meetup survey that we ask each attendee to complete as the team members are planning the meetup. And you know, it’s not just dietary needs, which are important, but it’s things like how far are you comfortable walking? Are you comfortable speaking up in public or would you rather have the questions beforehand? And so it gives you an understanding of people’s work styles, which are very different and helps the organizers to really plan a much more inclusive event. And those learnings then carry over after you get back from the meetup when you’re working online so that you can remember like, oh, this person doesn’t like to be called out on the spot. They like to have questions in advance so that they can think about it before presenting an answer. CHENDA NGAK: Now that Lori has explained the different types of meetups, I thought it would be interesting to get background on why we started doing them. So, I caught up with Toni Schneider who joined Automattic in 2006 as its first CEO, just six months after the company was founded. TONI SCHNEIDER: I think the reason we started having meetups right away and they worked right away is because there was a meeting of the existing team that was already distributed and working together via open source and really liked meeting in person every once in a while. So, that was already a pattern that was established and in my background, coming from other startups and spending a little bit of time at Yahoo, at a bigger company, kinda seeing if we fast forward this, if WordPress gets huge and we have a huge team, how can we make this work at scale? That’s gonna be different than tho...
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Episode 29: Dylan Field, Figma Co-founder, Talks Design, Digital Economy, and Remote Culture with Host Connie Yang
Nov 19, 202101:02:07Tap to summarizeSubscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. Nearly ten years ago, Dylan Field and Evan Wallace turned a Thiel Fellowship into a solution to the ‘single source of truth’ problem for design systems. Their interest in design collaboration and WebGL laid the foundation for the origin story of Figma, today’s ubiquitous browser-based design tool — and rapidly-growing company. “The more (we) pulled this thread, the more we learned there’s so much to do in terms of making design better, and in making it so more people can access design within the organization,” says Dylan of their early pursuis. (Spoiler: drone technology was a runner up in their technology explorations). The latest episode of the Distributed podcast pairs Dylan, Figma’s CEO and Co-founder, and guest host Connie Yang, Head of Payments Design at Stripe, with past design leadership posts at Coinbase and Facebook. Connie’s passion — uncovering the bits of magic surrounding us in everyday life — guides their friendly dialogue from design to remote culture and much more. Early in the show, Dylan shares what he’s learned about instilling culture in a rapidly-growing company, especially amid the changes brought on by the pandemic. “The main thing that changes once you go from in-person to remote is you can no longer rely on physical context to instill culture,” says Dylan. “It matters even more to elevate the role of design, and elevate anything you think is really important in that digital context.” Dylan also builds on a recurring Distributed podcast theme over the past year, adding “It’s really important to be intentional about creating serendipitous moments.” Figma’s playful approach to collaboration influenced its recently-launched FigJam, a digital whiteboard that can help fill the need for serendipity. Dylan speaks with the unique authority of a tech leader who has not only prioritized design but, with his team and products, greatly influenced it in a way that seems to have happened just in time for distributed collaboration. “We’ve gone from a physical economy to a digital economy. I don’t think these are new trends or new things that happen but now, all of a sudden it happened all at once, and accelerated massively,” he says, echoing Matt’s May 2020 post Gradually, Then Suddenly. “I think that we’re seeing every part of the economy shape around design,” says Dylan, noting how Figma has even observed collaboration in the product, beyond design, on days when other workplace chat tools were down. Why does it matter? Because now, Dylan says, “Design leads to winning.” Thank you to both of our guests for this latest episode of Distributed. We hope you enjoy it. The full episode transcript is below. *** CONNIE YANG: Hey everyone, welcome to the Distributed Podcast. I’m your host for today, Connie Yang. I am the Head of Payments Design at Stripe and I want to give a huge thanks to Matt Mullenweg for allowing me the opportunity to host this podcast. I am super excited to have an opportunity to talk to one of the leaders in advancing design technology and changing how we all in the industry work together. Dylan Field is not only co-founder and CEO of Figma, a collaborative design tool used by some of the biggest design teams in the space, he is also a leading advocate for bringing more designers into companies and the importance of the role of design in building successful products. He is also a huge proponent of community and an open source approach to design. Dylan, thank you so much for joining us today. DYLAN FIELD: Thanks, Connie. It’s really good to see you. CONNIE: Good to see you too. Dylan, before we even get into Figma and all the momentum you’ve built let’s start by talking about design itself. DYLAN: Okay. CONNIE: It seems like you had some amazing insight nearly ten years ago now on the importance of designers on teams, the way we work with one another and how we work with even non-designers. What did you discover about design in those early days that motivated you to dive into this world of design and creativity? DYLAN: Yeah so I’ve always been interested in design and excited about design product. But I think I started getting really excited about and interested in how do we make design tools better when I started working full-time as a design intern at Flipboard. And at the time I was kind of watching how the tools worked, we were in Fireworks pretty much every single day and collaborating through a Dropbox folder. We kind of had attempts to do a blog where we could post work in progress but honestly all the collaboration was kind of a mess and that was with a very design-forward team. Flipboard was very excited about let’s go make.. Flipboard was really into let’s go make design a really core part of the product experience and how we build product. And leaving Flipboard I was thinking a lot about creative tools with my co-founder Evan and should we go and build a company around this. And on the list was always design. We thought this would be a great area to go into is interface design but we weren’t sure the market was big enough. But honestly it was. Once we figured out that the market was there, the problems were very clear. It was.. the experience of designing product was not synchronous at all. It was you had all these different sources of truth, there was no one source of truth you could rely on. I remember the version problem where you have final underscore, final underscore two, you never know which one is the latest version. And then I started interviewing people at larger organizations and would hear stories about how a file would go halfway across the org at a super large enterprise and suddenly you’ve got some random product manager somewhere who’s mad at some other product manager because they think they’re doing something that they’re not even doing anymore because that was like two months ago. And the single source of truth problem was really huge. I think as we started to think about okay, what does it take to scale design teams up, design systems are incredibly important in that role and without a design system...
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Episode 28: Erica Pandey of Axios on Returning to Work
Jul 22, 202100:48:16Tap to summarizeSubscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. We admire journalists today more than ever. Whether getting their start as a solo blogger on their own beat, or growing up in a thriving newsroom, journalists must forge their own unique work life as they write the first draft of history. So it’s no surprise that this episode of the Distributed podcast with Matt Mullenweg and special guest Erica Pandey, business journalist and writer of the What’s Next newsletter at Axios, moves fast and covers a lot of ground, from Erica’s career, to how she works with her Axios colleagues in different cities and bureaus, to what she is seeing as she covers the intersection of technology, business and people. Erica has recently written about how workers are discovering their own ‘Third Workplace,” and shared insight on how HR departments can improve childcare benefits for working parents. “Childcare has always been a problem. The pandemic just spotlighted it, and hopefully now something will be done about it,” says Pandey. She balances Axios’ Smart Brevity style with authoritative reporting on complex topics, seeking multiples perspectives, from data to experts to people on the ground. Says Erica, “One of my greatest joys is being able to talk to people.” The lively conversation centers on how we’re all returning to work after so much change and adaptation, including the rise of hybrid workplaces. “The best possible form of hybrid – and this is not just me, this is what HR experts are trying to game out here – is everybody meeting, and (then) everybody at home, at the same time,” says Pandey. “The benefits of being in person, which are social interaction, which may be rubbing shoulders with leadership, which may be the innovation that happens on the spot when you are talking with someone at the coffee maker, happen when everyone is there. And then when everyone’s home, they can work on solo projects or get longer term projects done.” “When you make it so that there is no penalty for not being in the office,” Matt later agrees, “you’re not missing opportunities, you’re not missing socialization, you’re not missing anything. That is to me the superpower (of distributed work).” The duo see that this moment may represent – as Erica names it – a ‘code switch’ from prioritizing a job near your family and social life, to adjusting your work to where you live. But it’s an adjustment for everyone, she adds, including journalists: “Journalism is also so much about the energy of the newsroom. There’s the camaraderie of it too. When you’re always distributed…and you don’t get to come back to your desk with all of your colleagues typing away furiously, you do lose a sense of the team sport of it.” And that may be what we can all learn from journalists: at home, out for an interview, writing from a Third Workplace or with the team in the newsroom, figuring out how and where we work our best, deadlines and all. “We’re not work from home evangelists. We’re kind of like ‘Work from wherever you’re going to be most effective’ evangelists,” says Matt. “I can’t wait for people to experience a good version of work from anywhere – not where you’re isolated, and fearing for your life or your family, but where you can actually really get out and enjoy your community.” Thanks to Erica for joining and sharing her insight. And thanks for listening. The full episode transcript is below *** MATT MULLENWEG: All right, howdy everybody and welcome to the Distributed podcast. I’m your host, Matt Mullenweg. Today’s guest is a hard-working reporter covering the intersection of business, technology and people. Erica Pandy is a business writer for Axios and author of the What’s Next newsletter. The last few months of her coverage has included biometric tracking, pandemic-driven migration patterns and a subject near and dear to my heart, which is the fried chicken shortage. We follow her most closely for her extensive coverage of the changing workplace, including diversity hiring, gender inequalities and other trends surrounding the return-to-work discussion. Erica has been writing a lot about hybrid office culture, hybrid schools and even hybrid concerts and weddings. So you can imagine we’re going to be talking about one of our favorite topics – distributed work. Axios is an exciting publisher as well and Erica is right in the middle of some of the most relevant trends in reporting. So I’m excited to learn from someone whose work is all about learning from others in business, tech and beyond. So, Erica, thank you so much for joining today. ERICA PANDY: Thanks, Matt. It is awesome to be here. MATT: So, where are you joining us from today just out of curiosity? ERICA: So I actually am living out the trends that I’m writing. I lived in Brooklyn, New York, I was a classic millennial living in Brooklyn having that perfect hipster lifestyle. And after the pandemic hit, I have since moved to Hoboken, New Jersey. So, New Jersey has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the pandemic era exodus from New York and I am definitely part of that. I never saw myself as a New Jersey person but there’s more space and if I’m not going to be having to go to the office every single day I don’t mind being in a different state. MATT: How did you choose Hoboken? ERICA: A couple reasons. It’s just cheaper, first of all, than Brooklyn and I wanted to.. Also I’m one of those people who decided to buy during the pandemic. I had rented before this and for the price of something in Hoboken, I’d be living in a studio in Brooklyn. And there’s a little bit more space, there’s a little bit.. it’s a little quieter, a better place to raise a puppy. I also got a pandemic puppy. I’m really hitting all the stereotypes here. So, yeah, a plethora of reasons but yeah, not.. New York kind of shutting down for a year made me realize that I didn’t need to be in the thick of it all the time. MATT: How is it feeling over there? I’ve heard New York is feeling a lot of energy and almost back to normal. ERICA: Yeah, it really is. I mean, everything from the restaurant scene to the entertainment scene is back. And some of the things that the city is holding onto I think are great too. You know, all of those outdoor dining set ups that people really grew to love are staying up through the summer. And I think there is a real desire for that space that restaurants and people took over from cars in cities. So I’m hoping that the New York of the future will be a little bit more community driven and a little bit less just cars and parking. MATT: It also feels like restaurants that happen to have street front have disproportionately benefited from that from like a restaurant in a basement or a second floor. ERICA: Absolutely. It’s nice to see those kind of speakeasy type spots coming back too now that people aren’t really afraid to be in a cellar somewhere, in close quarters with others. Because that’s also quintessentially part of the New York experience. But that outdoor dining set up is basically like free advertising. You walk by, you see a well decorated outdoor dining set up, it’s covered, you go right ahead. And one interesting thing that I’ve seen in New York, I don’t know if it’s happening as much in other cities, is restaurants, which as you and I know have been battered by the pandemic, are using this new world to make money in new ways. Like, there’s some cafes here in New York that opened for dinner at five or six but during the day they rent out their table space to remote workers so you can work from a place that’s not the home or the office. MATT: Wow, and have you tried this yet? ERICA: Yes. I tried it at a cafe in the East Village called Kindred. They’re like Eastern European food at night and a classic dinner spot but during the day, for $25 you get a...
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Distributed by Default: Matt Mullenweg on The Knowledge Project
Jun 10, 202101:25:44Tap to summarizeSubscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. “Aren’t people lonely because they don’t have their friendships at work?” On a recent appearance of The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish of Farnam Street, Matt Mullenweg revealed that he hears this question often, and that the answer is one of many benefits of a company built to be distributed from the start. “If your only social network is at work, you might be lonely if you weren’t working with people physcally,” answered Matt. “But then what does that open up? It opens up the opportunity for you to choose people around you geographically to spend time with.” The conversation evolved to the Five Levels of Autonomy (spoiler: many companies made it to Level Two during the pandemic) and how it allows teams to focus on the work. “Part of our model of distributed work also provides a fair amount of autonomy in how people get their work done,” Matt said. “I like that it creates a lot more objectivity and focus around what the actual work is.” The episode was first published in January, but it is a great listen today as many companies that became distributed by necessity in 2020 make decisions about returning to work places. Shane and Matt also talk about blending the cultures of different business units within a company like Automattic, the future of proprietary software, and how Open Source is like kids banding together on a playground, for the greater good of the open web. This was the 100th episode of The Knowledge Project, whose recent guests have also included Angela Duckworth, Jim Collins and Josh Kaufman. You can listen to the full episode on your favorite podcast platform, watch it on YouTube, and read Shane’s highlights from the conversation over at The Knowledge Project.
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Episode 27: Leading with Values: Sid Sijbrandij joins Matt Mullenweg to talk about GitLab, Transparency and Growing a Distributed Company
May 21, 202101:18:43Tap to summarizeSubscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. “Every company has a poster on the wall,” says Matt Mullenweg in the latest episode of The Distributed Podcast. Matt welcomes Sid Sijbrandij, Co-founder and CEO of GitLab, another pioneering company with Open Source origins and a long-running commitment to a completely distributed workforce. Sid and Matt settle into a conversation about GitLab’s six values – which have been cut down from the original 13, and which are always visible in Sid’s video background – are reinforced in 20 ways at the fully-distributed company. GitLab, now with more than 1,300 employees, updated its values over 300 times in the last calendar year. “They have to be reinforced,” says Sid, “and be alive in that way.” And as for sharing just about everything publicly? “Transparency is sunlight.” The values are part of the publicly-viewable GitLab Handbook that, with over 10,000 pages, details data both interesting and “mundane,” from compensation to how employees should interact with Hacker News. An example: “I think what’s really interesting is our engineering metrics. We pay very close to what we call the MR rate: how many merge requests did an engineer make over a month; how many did a team make over a month?” Sid shares. “If you push on that, people start making the changes that they make smaller to kind of increase that rate. The whole process becomes more efficient.” Sid and Matt – an observer on GitLab’s board – get into the details: taking time off, leadership development programs, scheduling coffee chats that actually work, and much more. And they revisit predictions Sid made on Twitter in May, 2020, about the post-Pandemic future of distributed work. Check out the full episode above, or on your favorite podcasting platform. The full episode transcript is below. *** MATT MULLENWEG: Howdy everybody and welcome to the Distributed Podcast. I am your host, Matt Mullenweg. Today’s guest is a like-minded leader of a software company that is driven by its values, supports open source and happens to be distributed too. Sid Sijbrandij is the Co-Founder and CEO of GitLab, a fast-growing company and a single application for the entire DevOps (life?) cycle. GitLab has been distributed basically from the beginning. But last May, two months into the pandemic, Sid made some predictions that we will talk about today. Even more so, Sid very often talks about the values that drive GitLab and how they experience each day as a growing company, a really rapidly growing company, actually. So it’s rare to get to talk to someone who has been such an advocate for distributed teams as long. And also as full disclosure, I am a board observer of GitLab, so I have had an inside view to some of what y’all have been building and it has been amazing to have a seat at that table. So Sid, thank you so much for joining. SID SIJBRANDIJ: Yeah, you’re welcome. And thanks for being at that table at GitLab. MATT: Yeah. Talk to me. Let’s start off with just a little bit of the values that you hold as a company because I think every company has a poster on the wall – and you have one on your distributed wall – but how does it actually come into play for y’all? SID: Yeah, I think you can tell how serious a company is about its values in two ways – how often they update the values, our values got updated over 300 times last calendar year. MATT: Wow. SID: So it is a living document. And then the other thing is how do they reinforce the values. We have now 20 ways to reinforce our values. So it’s not that that document doesn’t matter, it is are they really lived. And for them to be lived, they have to be alive themselves and they have to frequently be reinforced and be alive in that way. MATT: I saw you could reinforce the values by complimenting people but you could also put a virtual background with one of the values on it as one of the 20 things? SID: Yes. If you see my Zoom, I will always have six logos above me. And those represent our six values. And yeah, I like the complimenting as well. We have a thanks channel and in that thanks channel people thank each other and then people can comment and they frequently do that with emojis that represent our values and then we keep count of who was particularly good in expressing certain values throughout the year. MATT: Do you tie them into performance reviews? Like, do people talk about the values as part of performance reviews? SID: With those emojis, that is linked to our annual event and we select the people who best represent a certain value and those emojis are used to create a short list and a group of people decides who best represented it. So it’s input. It’s not ideal but it gives a good way to make a short list. And then, yes, performance reviews, the values tie into that but also into hiring decisions. And for example, I think the most important thing is promotion documents. Every promotion document at GitLab is shared with everyone in the company and its primary structure is the values. MATT: To put you on the spot, can you name the six values? SID: Yes. We had 13 values before and even I couldn’t name them so that was a good reminder to rationalize. So our values spell the word credit. It’s the credit we give each other by assuming good intent. The first C stands for collaboration, the R stands for results, the E for efficiency, D for diversity, inclusion and belonging, the I stands for iteration and the T for transparency. MATT: I guess with D you kind of expanded it. It stands for multiple words, but that works. SID: Yeah, first it was D&I and now that we added belonging it.. I am open to changing the whole thing but I think having one letter per value is defensible. MATT: Since you have a backronym or an acronym that spells things out does that make it harder to add values of certain letters or make it more incentivized, like certain letters to be added, like maybe it would be easy to add a value with an S but it would be hard to add a value that started with X. SID: Yeah, Credits. Yeah. I guess there’s a certain amount of sunk cost there or inertia to overcome to change it. I think there hasn’t been a big push to add a value. We have had diversity changed to diversity and inclusion and now diversity, inclusion and belonging, that has been the major thing. Other than that, people talk about how do the values relate to each other and we have a lot of sub values. So for example, today I am having a call with Dara and Dara said, look, some of our sub values are more important than others. So the six values I mentioned are core values but then we have sub values that are kind of.. that relate to certain examples and that make it more concrete because otherwise it’s just words and they are very open to interpretation. The sub values makes them actionable. And Dara, her very good point was some of our sub values are more important and more actionable than others so maybe we should cull some of them or maybe we should elevate some of them. MATT: What were some of the values you got rid of or renamed? What were some of the seven that got cut out? SID: Yeah, I forgot about them so that’s good. But I think we found some overlap. The exercise we did is we wrote down all the values we had, we wrote down some that we thought we should have and started grouping them and we came to this. And actually it wasn’t a big exercise, it was me and my CEO coach who did that one afternoon in a couple of hours. And then I proposed it and it was clearly better and that’s how that happened. MATT: This is probably a good time to introduce the GitLab handbook. So all of these values and the 20 ways you can put them into effect and everything like that is all public on your website. SID: Yes. I think our handbook is now over 10,000 pages and it has all of...
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Hiring For Distributed Companies & Angel Investing: This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis
May 11, 202101:23:01Tap to summarizeSubscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. “Why would the best employees in the world choose so little autonomy in the third of their day or more that they spend working?” Matt Mullenweg asks Jason Calacanis in a recent appearance on the long-running This Week In Startups. The angel investing-themed episode opens with both investors sharing their approaches to early-stage companies, supporting entrepreneurs, and making an ecosystem-building impact, on top of return-on-investment. The conversation soon shifts toward the outlook for distributed work. “What do you think the world’s going to look like in six months when everybody’s got their shots and is back to work, in at least the United States and Europe?” Jason asks. Matt shares a hiring insight for distributed, global companies, from the changing perspective of a talented individual who can now work from many more places: “You can really build a robust social network with folks you choose to connect with…(anything) that gives you that sense of community, not just where you happen to work.” Matt’s latest appearance on the show – he first appeared on Episode 26 in 2010, according to Jason, and again in 2013 – touches on Automattic’s business structure, using collaboration tools like P2 to onboard new employees, cryptocurrency, and the value of editors. “I haven’t met a single writer – or any of my own writing – that hasn’t been vastly improved by really great editing,” says Matt. “Engaging your ideas with another human just improves them every single time.” You can listen to the full This Week in Startups episode here, or check out the YouTube channel.
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Getting Legal Work Done in a Distributed Environment: Paul Sieminski with Chad Main on Technically Legal
Apr 23, 202100:48:18Tap to summarizeSubscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. 500-page bound merger agreements, office printers, and libraries lined with law books. Legal work looks a lot different now that most in-house counsel (and law firms for that matter) have adopted some form of distributed work. But that doesn’t mean the work itself has changed. Contracts still need to be written and signed, litigation still needs to happen, and employment law might be more important than ever. What’s become clear over a year into a global pandemic is that legal work can be even more effective without the office. To make it happen, however, lawyers need to adapt their communication mediums and technology in a way that fits company culture and mission. Automattic’s General Counsel, Paul Sieminski, recently joined the Technically Legal podcast to talk about how legal work can thrive in a fully distributed company. “It’s aimed at a legal audience, and I love to remind my fellow layers how much value we can add to a distributed organization,” said Paul of his appearance on the podcast. “We are trained to communicate clearly, and especially to write cogently and persuasively. These are invaluable skills in any environment, but especially in an environment where writing is paramount…like a distributed company.” Paul has written on the topic in other places, such as Modern Counsel. He talks about communication starting just after the 23:00 mark with host Chad Main. For that discussion, and legal topics spanning the advantages of creating a searchable document database, to what tools and protocols we use to communicate transparently while protecting confidentiality, you can learn more about legal work in the distributed model by listening to the full episode here.
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Growing as a Leader: Matt Mullenweg on the Starting Greatness Podcast with Mike Maples Jr.
Apr 20, 202100:40:19Tap to summarizeSubscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. “Was there a palpable time when you felt like…you had to have a new kind of thought as you got bigger?” asks Mike Maples Jr., host of the Starting Greatness podcast in an April conversation with Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg. Matt shares several such pivotal moments in an episode full of stories and insight from the growth of Automattic, and of his own journey and leadership evolution. “For better or worse, you become close personal friends with everyone because you’re kind of in the trenches,” Matt said, sharing a story about when the company almost accepted an acquisition offer at a time of friction among the small, but growing, Automattic team. “So when you fight, it kind of feels like you’re fighting with your partner, your significant other.” Matt reflects on a journey from his Palm Pilot user group to first meeting Jeffrey Zeldman of A List Apart (and now a Principal Designer at Automattic), and later his first visit to San Francisco, all before committing full-time to WordPress and Automattic. Mike and Matt also touch on the difference between a learn-it-all and a know-it-all, and even some books that have been influential along the way. Maples, partner in venture capital firm Floodgate, has also hosted Annie Duke, Mark Cuban, Tim Ferriss and David Sacks in the second season of Starting Greatness, a podcast dedicated to startup founders who want to go from “nothing to awesome, super fast.” You can listen to the full Starting Greatness episode, and all others, right here.
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Episode 26: Jack Dorsey and Matt Mullenweg on Remote Collaboration, Finding Serendipity, and the Art of Deliberate Work
Dec 16, 202001:15:47Tap to summarizeSubscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. Join us for the latest episode of Distributed, as Matt Mullenweg interviews Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Twitter and Square. They discuss how both companies have embraced remote collaboration, the underrated value of deliberate work, and how questioning preconceived models from the get-go can change everything. This spring, Jack Dorsey told Twitter and Square employees they could work from home forever if they choose. But a year earlier –– before the global pandemic happened –– he had already started working from home two days a week. There wasn’t the noise or the distraction. It was a place and a time where he felt more freedom and creativity. Now, he reflects on how his way of working has evolved alongside Twitter and Square over the past year. From leading thousands of employees as a self-described introvert, to why he planned (and still does) to work from Africa for an extended period (spoiler: largely, to support entrepreneurs on the continent), Matt and Jack share ideas for combining the deliberate, thoughtful pace of asynchronous work with the serendipity that occurs in the office. “If we can run the company without missing a beat,” says Dorsey of planning to work in Africa, “it really opens the door for a lot, especially our ability to hire anywhere as well.” Tune in to learn how meetings work at fully distributed Twitter and Square, what open source and the punk scene have in common, why bringing thoughtfulness into collaboration is more important than ever, and if Jack Dorsey ever wants to go back to the old board meetings. Plus a whole lot more. The full episode transcript is below. Thanks to Sriram Krishnan for help preparing for this episode. *** MATT MULLENWEG: Howdy, everyone and welcome to the Distributed podcast. Today’s guest does not need much in the way of introduction. He is the co-founder and CEO of Twitter and also the Founder and CEO of Square. In addition to creating three iconic products, Twitter, Square and Cash App, he has been a philanthropist and a world traveler. And what we’re going to focus on today is he has recently issued an invitation to all Twitter and Square employees to work from home forever if they want. So everyone please welcome Jack Dorsey. Jack, thank you so much for being here. JACK DORSEY: Thanks for having me and making the time. MATT: Now I know that you like to live your life intentionally and I’m curious about the intentions that you have set currently for those three things we talked about, those three iconic products – Twitter, Square and Cash App. JACK: For Twitter, our intention is to serve the public conversation. It is our purpose and we believe global public conversation is just so important in that it elevates and amplifies some of the common problems we are all facing as a global community. Never has it been more true and a better manifestation than what we’ve seen with Covid and how the world was focused on one thing at the same time, which was pretty incredible to think about. And I think we’ll have a lot more of those. So, having a place for global public conversation that is valuable and is not just built around and encouraging more people to spend time with it but actually you can walk away from it and you learn something is ultimately the intention to learn from it, not be distracted by it. With Square, we have two ecosystems. And I call them ecosystems because they are this suite of tools that I think positively reinforce one another. And one is focused on sellers and the other is focused on individuals. So the little white reader was our beginning and it was a very simple tool to empower people into the economy, which was the company’s broader purpose, economic empowerment. And it has grown into a series of tools that not just help you take a credit card but actually understand your business or understand your customers and all of the goal of helping you grow if you make informed decisions about the data you have around you. So that business has done very well and we have helped sellers around the world, mainly offline sellers, physical sellers. And then Cash App, its intention – and this is broader for Square as well – is we see more and more people who don’t have a need for a traditional bank and being able to go to the app store, download something that you can store your money in, that you get a Visa card to spend that money around, you can go to an ATM and get actual paper cash or you can do things you couldn’t do at a traditional bank branch, like buy bitcoin or buy stocks, or fractions of stocks – if you can’t afford one share of a company that you love, you can buy five dollar’s worth of it. And all these things ultimately lead to empowering people into the economy in a way they didn’t have access to in the past. Like the stock thing is a great example. There’s a lot of people that love Disney, a lot of people can’t afford one share of Disney. But I can spend five bucks on it and I can see that five bucks grow over time. And if I don’t like the stock market, the crazy weirdness that is Bit Coin has had similar performance or greater performance. So that’s the intention for both, one, empowering public conversation because we just believe it’s so important to understanding our common problems that we’re facing, which we think there’ll be a lot more. And then Square and Cash App have an economic empowerment, just simple tools to empower people into the economy around them, which is very conversational and has a lot of parallels between the two. MATT: You mentioned the fractional thing. I’m surprised by how many people tell me they can’t afford to buy Bitcoin. I’m like, you don’t need to. JACK: Exactly. Yeah. MATT: You can get one Satoshi worth and… JACK: Yeah, exactly. MATT: Related, what’s your intention for coming on this podcast about distributed work? JACK: Anytime I go on a podcast I get feedback and I always have an opportunity to learn from the feedback. So hopefully I’m gonna learn from the conversation with you because you’ve been doing this for quite some time. But also I imagine our conversation will result in some feedback that I see on Twitter or in my email inbox about how I’m thinking and how it might be better evolved in this direction or if I consider something new. So it’s really to learn. MATT: Well I’m excited about it. Thank you so much for coming by. I know that distributed work is not a new practice for you. Can you talk a little bit about your history with it? JACK: The only reason I’m in this space, in technology, is because I benefited so deeply from open source early on. I was a kid growing up in St. Louis, Missouri and was active in the BBS community and when the BBSs finally got access to the internet through Washington University, it just opened the door to so much. And for me it demystified a lot of how computers and networks work because I could actually see the source code based on this extreme generosity by others to share their work and to, I think more importantly, be okay with failing in public and being open in public. And it resonated with me a lot because I was in the punk scene, which is very much a pick up a guitar, be horrible at it for a while and then eventually you get better and better as you play in front of people and you do that uncomfortable yet courageous thing to put yourself out there. And I saw a lot of the same patterns with open source. And these people were not in any one location. They happened to be all around the world. I mean, obviously (Linus?) [00:06:33.15] started in Finland and had a community across the internet that was helping him build something of immense complexity that had incredible value and it was all visible. And not just the source code that made the operating system work but the way they worked together was visible. The way they disagreed was visible, the way they slowed each other down was visible. So I guess I’ve been a student of these models for quite some time but they have been fairly limited in my direct experience to open source (rather than?) companies. And when we were start...
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Episode 25: Davit Baghdasaryan on the Science of Sound in a Distributed Work World
Oct 15, 202000:42:53Tap to summarizeSubscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen. Trying to sound your best as you work away from an office more than ever before? As audio and video conferencing surge worldwide, Matt talks about the science of sound with Davit Baghdasaryan, the CEO of Krisp, a fast-growing company offering an AI-powered noise cancellation app for removing background noise on any conferencing platform. Krisp’s technology, including its proprietary deep neural network krispNet DNN, processes audio securely on the user’s computer. Find out how Krisp started, why Davit foresees his company returning to a hybrid work model, and what it means to Work from Forest. With employees in the United States and Armenia that shifted to working from home in 2020, Krisp surged this challenging year, announcing a $5M Series A round in August and growing to 600 Enterprise customers despite continuing to focus on consumer users. Check out this demo of how Krisp works in meeting room.) A native of Armenia, Davit spends time in both countries leading Krisp. Prior to co-founding Krisp, Davit was a Security Product Lead at Twilio in San Francisco, among other security-focused technology leadership roles. The full episode transcript is below. *** (Intro Music) MATT MULLENWEG: Howdy everybody. Today we are going to talk to the Co-founder and CEO of a company whose technology makes it easier for those of us working from home to hear each other, even with all of life’s noisy distractions going on in the background behind us. At Automattic we say, “Communication is oxygen.” We are advocates of anything that makes communication easier and more effective. And one of the tools I find myself recommending over and over again is Krisp, which is an app that uses machine learning to mute background noise in just about any communication apps you use. For Krisp’s Davit Baghdasaryan, there is even more to the story. He is leading a young and fast-growing company through the challenges and opportunities of this year, balancing his own company’s transition to a remote workforce and a surge in demand for Krisp. He is a native of Armenia and also a global citizen and experienced technology leader at great companies Twilio and he has made his own adjustments to working and leading from a distributed point of view. So today we are going to chat. And thank you so much for being here. DAVIT BAGHDASARYAN: Thank you, Matt. Thanks for the intro. Hi, everyone. I’m Davit, CEO and Cofounder at Krisp, as Matt mentioned. I’m so happy to join this podcast. MATT: Was there any key biographical detail that was missed that you’d love to share, things that people usually don’t know? DAVIT: Absolutely. I think that was a great introduction. I was born in Armenia, I’ve lived in ten years in the U.S. Right now I’m back in Armenia. I’m sure we will go deeper on my background and biography. I’m happy to share as much as needed. MATT: In 2018, when you started Krisp, what was the thing that you were seeing? Because people weren’t on calls or Zoom nearly as much back then. What was the need you were seeing? DAVIT: Yes, absolutely. Well the story behind Krisp is very personal. I was actually working at Twilio, which is a big communication platform, and actually at Squadcast. I just figured that Squadcast is powered by Twilio. But because my family and my friends were in Armenia, I was traveling a lot to Armenia at every chance, I guess. And because of the time difference, almost 12 hours of difference, when I was connecting to meetings, it was evening time here. And in the evenings you want to go out with friends and family but that was the time that I needed to join meetings, like my daily meetings. I was heading the Product Security at Twilio so that means I have many meetings with different teams. And I always wished there was a button I clicked and get some privacy, like people don’t know where I am, [laughs] they don’t know that I’m joining from bars. Not necessarily bars of course, but still. MATT: So almost like a virtual Zoom background but for audio. DAVIT: Exactly. So I had the need but I had no idea how to build the technology. And I knew it must be done with machine learning. I knew about voice but not machine learning. But I mean that’s where I met my cofounder and that’s how things have started. MATT: I think I first came across Krisp actually on the NVIDIA machine learning blog. It was very early on, it felt like the company was.. I think it was all still free at that time. DAVIT: Yes. Well actually Krisp wasn’t released at that time yet, or maybe just launched. And then that blog post was very important for us. We worked on it for a very long time and that was the first exposure that our company received. And the blog post got actually a lot of visibility. So it was at some point I believe the most shared and visited blog post on NVIDIA developer AI section. So yeah, it brought us a lot of visibility. MATT: I actually made a mistake early on when I was advocating for Krisp. I told people it was from NVIDIA, or spun out of NVIDIA, I was so.. Because the post had seemed so great I couldn’t imagine that it was a guest post. DAVIT: Yeah. Well there is a fun story actually behind that. When we did that post and it was successful, we thought that we needed to put that post on Hacker News. And we put a title which sort of implied that it was from NVIDIA so that people open it more. It was a small hack from us and it worked out because Krisp, that blog post was in the top five of Hacker News that day. Yeah, exciting times. MATT: That might’ve been where I saw it too. [laughter] I don’t recall exactly but that would certainly be plausible. So I imagine you’re able to kind of turn Krisp on and off on your set up right now. Can you demonstrate how it works? DAVIT: Yes, absolutely. So Krisp is on right now. I’m going to clap. I’m clapping right now. And when I do this with video it’s much more impressive. And now I’m going to go, it’s a single button, when I turn it off and then I clap [clapping] you hear the clap. Right? MATT: Yeah. DAVIT: Yeah, that’s the easiest way to demonstrate it. But Krisp is.. with Covid and with everything that happened lately, people moving to home, Krisp was very handy with kids at home, with dogs barking at home. So it does a great job at removing noise. And I’m happy to actually dig more into how that works and where Krisp is going. MATT: It reminds me of the Zen Koan, what’s the sound of one hand clapping. I guess it’s like Krisp. [laughter] Oh, one reason I have been advocating for it a lot is that for a good meeting you don’t need video, you could turn video off its not working, we’re not using any video now obviously, but if audio doesn’t work, the meeting stops. A meeting with video.. unless I guess you’re really good at American Sign Language or something, you really do need great audio. And I find it so distracting when folks have just a ton going on in the background. But I also feel for them because we are all home, we have kids working from home, all sorts of things. What sort of Covid boost have you all seen? DAVIT: Yes, absolutely. Well...
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