Joel Gascoigne: Can You Build a Business Based on Some Core Principles?

Joel Gascoigne, co-founder of Buffer, shares some of his thoughts on the on the advantages and disadvantages of building a business while sticking to the core principles that he and his partner Leo set out when they founded the business.

Can such a highly distributed, radically transparent approach to building a business pay off in the long term? See the video below to find out.

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Transcript

I’m Joel Gascoigne. I’m the co Founder and CEO of a company called Buffer. How many of you guys have come across Buffer? Awesome. How many of you use Buffer? I’m always just curious. Cool, great.

So, today I would just want to share a few different stories from the journey of Buffer, so far. And I want to talk to you today about company culture and being a distributed team, which has been a lot of fun for us.

Just to begin with, a little bit of background about me. I’m originally from the UK, and I studied computer science in the UK. I had a previous startup that I worked on in the UK, and, yeah, I also started Buffer from the UK.

The first eight months of Buffer, we were bootstrapped, and we did it from the UK, and we went from zero to about 10k a month in revenue.

Raising Seed Funding

And so I started Buffer in the UK at the end of 2010, so we’ve been going about four years now. And then July 2011 I first flew out to San Francisco, and we were lucky to go through a great accelerator program called Angel Pad, and we raised our seed round of 450k.

And that’s when things started to become a bit different for us, and we started to follow a different path than a usual startup, and that’s what I want to talk to you about today.

So the first thing that happened that was quite different was that we didn’t manage to get visas to stick around in the country. So we had to, had to leave the US. Type Punch actually ran with the headline “Buffer raises $400,000 gets kicked out of USA”.

So yeah, we had to think, what do we do at this point? And after six months in San Francisco, it was not that appealing for us, for me and my co founder Leo, to go back to Europe, where we spend most our lives. So we did what any normal person would do, and we opened up Google Maps in our apartment in Russian Hill in San Francisco, and thought, where in the world should we go? And that’s kind of where we had an interesting journey start.

We decided in the end, to go to Hong Kong for six months. So we just raised $450,000 from angel investors. We took the money, went to Hong Kong. Yeah, and we spent six months in Hong Kong. And then after that, we went to Tel Aviv in Israel for three months, and spent three months there. It was a lot of fun. The beaches are incredible, and then, but we had a lot of fun, but we also worked hard.

So we’ve been going about four years now. As I mentioned, we’ve just crossed $4 million in annual revenue, and we’re about $4.25 million right now.

Speaking at BoS Conference

So when Mark asked me to speak at Business of Software. I thought, what would be the most interesting things I can talk about? So Mark asked me to talk about the Buffer culture. And I thought, what are the most unusual things that we do? And so this is what I’ve come up with.

First, I want to talk about transparency. It’s one of our core values at Buffer. You might have seen some of the things we do there, and I’ll get into more detail on that. Then I’m going to talk about values and the culture we have. We’ve put our culture into words quite early. We did that when we’re seven people. And the third thing I want to talk about is being a distributed team. We have a team of 25 people right now. We’re spread across all across the US, then Mexico, Canada, two people in the UK, two in South Africa, one in France and one in Taiwan. So I’m going to talk about how that even works in practice, and what that means for how we work differently to other companies.

So yeah, I’ve got three stories I want to share. I’m going to show about share the origin of these three different parts of the culture and the implications as well. So I’m going to shoot for about 10 minutes for each story, and then I’d love to have any questions after that as well.

Buffer

Before I dive in, I wanted to say at least a few words about the product. For any of you that have not come across it or used it. I’m not going to be talking much about the product in this talk, So, but Buffer, the problem that we solve is with posting to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. So we help you. We give you a queue, and you can put content in that queue, and then we’ll post it for you well spaced out throughout the day. As well as helping you with the publishing side of social media, we also give you detailed analytics for everything that you share.

Transparency

Great. So I want to dive in with the first kind of story I have, which is around transparency.

Before I jump into where transparency all started from. I just wanted to be transparent and just share some of the current numbers. Buffer mentioned some of these already, but right now, we have about 1.7 million users. That’s registered users. We have about 165,000 monthly active users. 28,000 of them are paying and that gives us we have pricing plans from $10 a month up to $250 a month. And then we have a few enterprise customers beyond that as well. So that gives us a annual revenue of 4.2 5,000,001.

Thing I wanted to share, which I think if anyone shares the other numbers, then this is probably a number that people don’t often share, which is the monthly revenue churn. We have about 5.5% monthly revenue churn right now. Another thing that we do is all salaries within the company are not only transparent within the company, but also completely public. And so I just put my own salary on there, which is 175,000. Cool. So I tried to think, where did the transparency even start? Because it’s one of those things that we have now, and it’s sometimes hard to trace back completely.

I think one of the first things was that with the previous startup that I did before Buffer, I was always just sharing the lessons I was learning, the successes and failures we were having, new features, we were launching. And I think in a way that Twitter actually encourages transparency on a huge scale, which I think is really great. So that’s probably one of the things that started off the transparency.

And interestingly, for me, I’m a coder. My background is development. I’ve been coding since I was about 12, and so marketing is not my strongest point. But the interesting thing was that by just sharing the lessons that we were learning while doing that previous startup, I managed to connect with a lot of people on Twitter and grow my following, and had about 1,700 followers by the time that I started Buffer. And I was lucky, because Buffer, the target audience is Twitter users. At least at the beginning, it was specifically Twitter users. So it worked really well as a marketing channel. And actually the initial marketing for Buffer was purely me tweeting about it.

I think the next key part of the origin of kind of transparency as part of the culture was the lean startup. I got really hooked on the ideas that Eric Ries proposed around validating your idea before you go out and build it. And I really liked it because it kind of turned something that was a bit of an art into more scientific. And I’m very scientific minded. I think one of my realizations is that the Lean Startup almost requires transparency, because the whole idea is that you create a minimum viable product, you put your idea out in its earliest form, and then you get feedback.

I think a lot of times I hear people coming to me and saying, Oh, I’m going to do the lean startup. I’m gonna do a minimum viable product, gonna put it out there. But how do I protect my idea? How do I, how do I make sure no one steals it? And I think, I’m like, well, that’s not really gonna work for you. So we kept just sharing everything. And you know, when we whenever we get press for a new product launch, we would always share all the details with the publications. I think the reporters were often surprised, but I think they really appreciated it.

So we ended up with headlines like this where we shared the revenue and user numbers and everything, and we also wrote our own articles. This is one where we wrote about our seed round and shared all the 19 different investors that we got into the round and how we met them, the benefits and that what we learned from them.

About a year and a half ago now, we decided to set down our culture and put it into words, and we knew that transparency will be one of the key values as part of the culture, and we decided to phrase it as default to transparency. And that kind of took us a step further than we than what we’d been before, where we naturally shared things just because we felt like that was the right thing to do. But now it was kind of we felt like we wanted to make this commitment, and so we phrased it as default to transparency. That literally meant that everything that we did, we wanted to be transparent about unless there’s very good reason. So kind of shift that default, I think often the default is to be secretive about things.

So after that, we ended up finding one thing after the next within the culture within the company and how we were operating, but things that we were not being completely transparent about. This is one example, which is salaries and actually equity as well, just compensation in general.

What we do now is we have so salaries are completely transparent and public as well. We have a formula that determines the salary of everyone in the company, and we’ve made not only the formula public, but also the individual list of everyone in the company and their salaries public as well. And the formula is based on your role, your experience, your location, things like that. So yeah, if you want to check that out, it’s actually just a Google spreadsheet that’s completely public. You can go and have a look. There’s usually a few visitors at any time. You can see that at buffer/open/pay.

Another example I wanted to share is how we do email at Buffer. So this is something that we were inspired by Stripe to do. They wrote a great blog post. I think the title was email transparency. What we do is every email within the company is transparent. Any email that’s going on, you can see that email. And how we do that is we have within Google Apps, we have several different email lists.

So we have marketing, product, customer service, all different lists for every different area, and everyone is in every list. So everyone gets every email, and whenever you’re emailing somebody, you will just CC that list, and then we can see everything, and we have a lot of filters in place to kind of move it out your inbox. The idea is that it doesn’t overwhelm you, but it’s just always available. There you can go and look at it anytime.

We also even have transparency outside the team as well when we’re emailing. So one example would be when we’re getting some press and maybe Courtney in the marketing team is talking with TechCrunch and Pando daily and some other sites, then she will be busy seeing the marketing list. And that means that the whole team can see the whole conversation there, and it’s really great for learning.

I think we have two key benefits from the transparent email. One is around being completely in the loop, everyone knowing what’s going on, and the other is the learning aspect as well, so people that are doing customer service or coding can understand how it works to end up on TechCrunch or something like that. Then if I’m emailing with investors, we have a list for that, and I’ll BCC that list as well. And the reason we BCC is that it will just be very confusing for the external person if they see that list, and also they’re not, they can’t email that list. So sometimes they’ll reply to that, and it gets a bit messy, cool. So I guess, you know, it’s we’ve got to this point we do all this transparency.

I think what I get asked a lot is, why would you even have that level of transparency? What are the benefits? So I just wanted to go through a few of them that we’ve seen at Buffer.

Reasons for Transparency

The first one is that, I think the fundamental reason that we have transparency at Buffer is around trust, and I think especially within the team. I believe that trust is the foundation of great teamwork, and I think transparency is one of the best ways to increase trust. Everyone knows what’s going on. There’s no questions being asked or jealousy and things like that. And I think that trust also extends beyond within the team as well. So one thing we’ve seen is that by sharing all these insights, I think customers and readers of the blog and many different people couldn’t understand our decision process for different things.

So this was just a quote that I wanted to share, kind of based around this idea, there’s a great company called Semco, and Ricardo Semler has written a few books. This is from his book, The Seven Day Weekend. And he said, On several occasions, I’ve taken our internal profit calculations out of one of the director’s briefcases and given the customer a copy. Here’s what we plan to make as a profit. Do you think it’s too much? What do you think we should do? And I think it’s just really inspiring to see that level of transparency and the effect it can have.

And he mentioned in the book that the customer is or the client is very surprised by that, but it has a great impact. And so the other day, I was buying a hoodie, a sweatshirt, from a company called Everlane, and I noticed on the page for the sweatshirt, they have this section transparent pricing, and it’s really great. They break down the exact cost of the materials, the labor, the transport, and then they give you the true cost for them to manufacture that hoodie, and then they share how much they charge and how much other retailers charge. And I think it just has a great impact.

That’s something that we want to try and start doing more. It’s breaking down the price points that we have and saying, you know, it’s just a nice thing to see, like, where’s your money going to be going?

The second reason for transparency that we’ve seen is around innovation, and this is something Kirk BoS said, if you want people to make the same decisions that you would make, then how can they do that without having the same information that you have? This is something that’s becoming really interesting for us as we scale. We’re now 25 people, and we’re growing pretty fast this year.

That’s something that we’ve found really important. Once we start having other people making a lot of the decisions, most of the things are not coming from me or my co founder anymore. Another reason is and Whole Foods are a great inspiration on this one, I have to admit, it’s not the initial reason that we’ve done it, but Whole Foods also have salary transparency, just internally, and the one of the key reasons that they do it is to eliminate any kind of inequality around the salaries. So I think that’s a really amazing reason and side benefit of transparency.

For example, we don’t have a gender factor in the salary formula. And I think if you would look underneath a lot of companies, there is a lot of inequality in that, and probably other areas. Another reason is feedback. If we’re putting all this out there, we did a big, long blog post explaining the salary formula, how we thought about that, and we had an incredible number of comments. And it’s part of, part of putting out there is that we’re open to that feedback.

We’ve learned a huge amount from that feedback, and we’ve made the salary formulas change many times. It’s never perfect. There’s still some key flaws in it right now, and so we’re always working through these things, but we get a lot more feedback this way.

I think a little side benefit, which maybe some of you have come across, is that we do seem to get a lot of attention for this level of transparency. So when we were transparent about salaries, we published it on our blog. I think it was interesting, because it’s one of the first times that we didn’t try and do any press.

When we do a product launch, we’ll always have embargo and give somebody exclusivity and try hard to get press with salary transparency. We thought, Oh, we’ve just got to put it on our blog, and we didn’t even think about it, and then suddenly, that day, it just blew up, and we were everywhere. And it’s been a nice side benefit. It’s not the reason that we do it, but it’s interesting side effect.

And the other thing is that once we did that, we started to get a lot more applications for for jobs. So we, we’re getting about three or 4000 applications a month right now, which is pretty incredible, and we, unfortunately only can grow the team by a few people every month, but it’s been a great and you know, the people that apply are very aligned as well. They are inspired by the transparency they want to be at a company that has that level of transparency thing.

One of the most cool things for me was I once had an interview. I did the final interview for a new team member, and they said to me, I feel like I know more about Buffer than I do about the company that I’m working for right now.

So that was cool, but what I wanted to finish on with transparency is that I think you can find these reasons for transparency, but we struggled to find reason. We kind of did it naturally, and we believe in it, and we believe it’s the right thing to do. It’s honesty at the end of the day. But then, after we had it in place, we people started asking, like, why? And I think for a while, we tried to find reasons why.

There’s a book called joy at work by Dennis Bakke. He’s the founder of a company called AES, which is a big oil company. They reached 10s of 1000s of employees, billions in revenue. And one of the things they had was they had a core value of fun in their company, and they tried to stick to that with everything that they did. And one of the things he said is that as they had more successful periods or periods of struggle, the board would be more excited or less excited about the culture that they had. And so he said that he kept saying to the board that the values were not responsible for the share price going up or going down, and shouldn’t be a factor.

So that’s the way that we think about it now, is just it’s a core principle. We plan to stick by it. And I think it’s dangerous if you do establish core principles, it’s dangerous to tie those to performance, because you’re just going to question them when you when you’re having periods that are a bit tougher.

Values and Culture

The second story I wanted to share today is how culture came about, how we put our culture into words, and this has been a key factor with how we’ve hired and fired and operated the company.

So I think in the early days, if I think about culture, when I first started the company, I had no idea what culture was. I didn’t know what it meant. Maybe I come across it. I think I even studied it a little bit at school, but I didn’t know the meaning of it at all. And just was really thinking about, what’s the product, how can we solve the problem for the customer? And but if I do think back, there’s a few key things that me and my co founder Leo really aligned on in the early days, which ended up becoming kind of the foundation for the culture and the values that we came up with.

And one of them is the book How to Win Friends and Influence People. I’d read the book maybe a couple of times before I started buffer, and then I naturally ended up introducing it to my co founder, Leo. We had a few situations where we had tough customer situations. People are getting upset about something going wrong, and I found that the stories from the book were just hugely insightful for helping us get past some of these struggles. And so quickly, after I introduced Leo to the book, he ended up sharing the stories, and I was sharing the stories, and we ended up talking a lot about the different concepts and principles in the book.

The other thing was that I was got quickly interested in self improvement and philosophy and those kind of areas. And one thing I kept coming across again and again, in many different forms, was this idea that you are profoundly impacted by the people that you choose to hang around. And so that was kind of another thing that helped us think, Oh, we really should think about who we decided to have in the company. And I think in a way, this was one thing that’s often talked about in terms of friends, but the people you work with are probably the people you spend maybe even more time with than friends.

And then I started reading about culture a little bit more, and obviously Zappos are a huge inspiration for us in terms of culture. I think they’re probably the most well known company for having a great culture. But as I read more, I found two interesting discoveries that I hadn’t come across before, in terms of with Zappos and the first one you probably come across, which is that Tony Shah actually sold his previous company because he got to a point where he just didn’t enjoy the culture at all. He didn’t want to wake up in the morning and go to work and work with the people that he’d hired. And that was really interesting.

The second thing was that, in an interview, he shared that they actually only created the values and put the culture into words, when they reached about 100 people, and he said, If there’s one thing he would change, it’s that he would do that earlier. So I think as soon as I saw that interview, I thought, wow, okay, we want to do that earlier then, because it seemed crazy. How can you establish the culture when you’re 100 people? What about all those people you’ve hired?

So when we were about seven or eight people, I noticed that the team dynamics started to play a much more important role. I think there’s this idea that the number of relationships kind of increases exponentially as you have more people.

I think this is just probably one of the best quotes that I’ve come across in terms of company culture, which is that every company has a culture. It’s similar to having a brand you the only thing is whether you decide to shape that culture. And so we got to this point where we thought, right? We want to shape the culture. We need to define it.

About a year and a half ago, I created a Wufoo survey, and I sent it round the team. And I think we were at a point where we believed that there was already a culture, Buffer had a culture we just wanted to put into words. So I sent this survey around and asked, What are three values that you would use to describe Buffer? How would you describe the culture as it is right now, we also had a bonus question, which we’ve still not solved, which is, what would you call someone who’s in the Buffer team? We had a lot of different ideas, Buffer, Buffer, right? I think the best one was buffalo. So, but if you have any ideas, we’re still trying to solve that one. So yeah, we spent a few weeks, had great input from different people in the team, and then we decided to establish the culture and put it into words. You can check out the culture deck at buffer/buffer-values, and a lot of it came directly from what people said.

Transparency came up many times as well. And I want to share just a few of the values that we have, just to show kind of how far we tried to go with some of the values, and how it’s we try and make it quite specific to Buffer and not just general words that could be seen as good in any situation.

Buffer’s Values

So our first value is always choose happiness and positivity. And so we have things like approaching things in a positive and optimistic way, being deliberate about giving genuine appreciation and also never complain, which is a really hard one, and it’s something I personally slip up with a lot, but it’s one of those things we really aspire to. And this guides how we bring people into the team.

We will actually look at people’s, I mean we’re a social media startup, so we’re always looking at people’s Twitter and things, but if we notice a lot of complaining, it’s probably not going to work out. If there’s just one thing, then maybe we can work through that, and maybe they have a desire to complain less, but that’s just one example.

Another value we have is to be a no ego doer. And I think the key part of this is not attaching your personal self to ideas. And we had this foundation, starting with the lean startup. The idea is that you put things out there before it’s ready in order to learn. And I think one of the hardest parts about that is, if people have spent time on something and feel attached to it, and then we have to pull it back and throw it away, that can be really difficult. So that’s kind of the no ego do a part.

And we also do have this ambition where we want to move fast. We have this kind of startup aspect to Buffer. So that’s one thing around productivity, where we need that level of kind of ambition from people.

The final value I just wanted to share with you is our value listen first, then listen more. And this is around firstly, around listening. The idea from Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, of seek first to understand, then to be understood. But it’s also around how you even talk with people as well.

So one of the things we do at Buffer, which is kind of unique, is that we’re always trying to approach everything as being a hypothesis, saying and believing that it could be wrong. One of the ways that we do that is in the words that we choose. So we choose to have kind of suggestive words, saying, maybe this could work. Or I think this, or my intuition right now is this, rather than being really certain, saying, like this is the way it needs to be. And so that’s kind of one of the key things we also look for. So after we established the culture, I started to read a lot more.

One of the best books I came across was Good to Great by Jim Collins. I think that’s had a huge impact for us. And one of the things he said, he has a chapter in the book. The chapter is first who, then what. And he has this key kind of analogy of a bus, and he says, First, get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and then figure out where you want to take it, because you’re going to have to change your product or adapt to the market, and it’s really important to have the right people first.

Another book I read was The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, and this talks about five different ways that teams can be dysfunctional, and how you can work through that. I think that it’s a really great book. I can highly recommend it. And so what started to happen was that we’d set down the values, which is great, but the hard part was that in the early days, I didn’t know anything about culture, so I kind of brought people onto the team purely based on the skills gaps that we had. And I started to notice, oh, like some of these values, maybe there’s some misalignments. And then I started to read around, read Good to Great and other books. And so in terms of getting the wrong people off the bus? Good to Great has a great part of the book where it talks about, how do you even know if it’s the wrong person to be on the bus? And they have two key questions that Jim Collins suggests, and this has now become an exercise that we do regularly within the company.

So the two questions are, would you hire that person again with what you know now? And if the person came to you to tell you that they found an exciting new opportunity, would you be disappointed, or would you be secretly relieved? And these are kind of tough, like questions that go deep. And so we what we do is we just have a grid. Meet everyone in the company, and we try and answer these questions. And if it’s not, yes, yes, but yes, you would hire them again, and yes, you would be disappointed. Then there’s some issues that you need to work through. And so whenever that happens for us, we know we’re going to have, we have to go and talk with them, give them feedback, and in some cases, it means that it’s not the right place for them to be.

So what happened was, and I think we’re unique in this regard, because not many companies talk about this either, is we’re 25 people right now, but I’d say we’ve probably fired, which I think is fired is a strong word for us. It’s never that they’ve done something really wrong. It’s just that it’s not a great fit. But out of becoming a 25 person company, we’ve probably let go 15 or 20 people. So kind of the effort of hiring maybe 45 people in a way, and this is just a illustration of there’s this big dip, kind of middle of or early part of 2013 where we had this realization, and then we realized there was a few misalignments, and we had to ask a few people to leave. And that was a really tough point for me, because I had never fired anyone before in my life.

And so the first person was we had a third co founder, and we realized that it was not a great fit, and we decided we need to part ways. That was the first person. And then there was a point where, within one month, I had to fire three people, and it was probably the one of the hardest things that I’ve had to do. And by now for us, that’s just become a part of the way that we operate. And I think that if you really think about trying to create a great team, a great company, having a great culture, you’re going to have to fire people at times. We’ve adapted our hiring process a lot by now to try and make sure that we get the right people. But there’s some things that you can only find out once you’re working together. And I think one of the things that’s helped me the most in that tough period and now, kind of as we go forward, is another Jim Collins quote.

You know how much I love that book by now, but he said, for every minute that you allow someone to stay at the company when you know that they’re not going to make it and thrive and move up into different roles, you’re essentially stealing a portion of their life, and they could be finding the next thing that’s a much better fit for them. And so that’s something that really helped me with going through some of those tough conversations with people, and what we found is that often people do bounce back almost immediately.

So in the example of our third co founder, Tom, he’s a great friend of mine, we still chat a lot. I was on the phone with him just the other day, and he went on to create a to found a company called Squiggle. We use their product all the time. It’s based on some of his experience at Buffer being part of a distributed team, and so they have this video chat product for remote teams, and it’s really great. And we’re a paying customer, and we love it, and I think that was a much better fit for him, and it was the best thing. It’s hard, but it’s kind of one of those things that we’ve found.

Distributed Team

One last story I want to share, which is how we became a distributed team, and how that affects things. So I mentioned we’re 25 people spread completely across the world, and kind of where it all began was me and my co founder. When we started buffer from the UK, from I was in Birmingham, he was in Coventry, so we were half an hour apart, not very distributed, compared to what we are now. But at the same time, we didn’t work in the same place every day. That was enough of a distance that we felt like, oh, we just worked separately.

Once a week, on a Saturday, we would get together and work in the same place, but most of the time we would just use Skype chat and communicate that way. Then we flew to San Francisco, and as you know, I mentioned in the beginning, we were there for six months. Actually, Tom, the third co founder joined us halfway through that point and was working from the UK for several weeks, so we were already kind of distributed there as well. Then we went to Hong Kong and Tel Aviv, and after that, I came back to San Francisco. And during that period, we’d grown to about six or seven people, and naturally, the easiest way for me to grow the team at that point was to look within my own personal network.

So we hired people from the UK. So when we were in Hong Kong, we were like Hong Kong, UK, and then Tel Aviv in the UK, and then I got back to San Francisco. And I went back for a few months, still without the visa, but it was on the horizon, and I was lucky to have a be able to meet David Cancel at a coffee shop. He’d probably come across this guy, I think he’s probably across the road at HubSpot conference.

He’s currently the Chief Product Officer at HubSpot. And I managed to get him at a point where we’d grown to six people, but then we were all distributed. But there was something that, like, was a link, was we all had a desire to be in San Francisco. We’d kind of come across it and spent time there, and felt like, oh, we want to get back there.

So I was at this point, was kind of a fork in the in the road, you know, do we keep being a distributed team, or do we move have everyone in San Francisco and be in one place? So I managed to ask David Cancel, what his advice would be. He’s had three different companies, and the last one he sold to HubSpot. And he said he’s done it both ways. He said to me, he’s been a distributed team, and he’s also, I think, with performable, his last company, everyone was in one location. But the key thing he advised me, said, make sure you pick one or the other, and you don’t end up in the middle where you have most people in an office and a couple of people remote, because that’s where you end up with second class citizens, and it’s just really tough.

So this was just great advice at that point for me, and I realized, Okay, we have to make the decision completely one way or the other, and it’s really very related to what how Basecamp also approach it. And one of the things they say is that there should be no advantage for being in the office and no disadvantage to not being in the office as well. And so this is one of the things that we try to stick by as well, so we don’t have snacks or other like perks in the office.

We have an office in San Francisco just because we have five people there, which is our kind of biggest hub. So I went back to the UK and took a trip to the US Embassy in London to pick up my visa. And during those few weeks in the UK, I really had a chance to think, Oh, what do we want to be? Do we want to keep being distributed and double down there and keep finding people for the team outside, from all across the world? Or do we want to do what is more traditional and have everyone in one location? I thought about a lot, and then in the end, I decided to send an email to the team saying, and the subject line was, Buffer will be a distributed team.

I thought about all the different reasons we should go one way or the other. And so for us being a distributed team, one of the key kind of experiences I had was when I was in Hong Kong. I was sitting there in Hong Kong in a coffee shop working, and I was thinking, wow. Like, why should someone in Hong Kong that’s using Buffer have a worse customer service experience than somebody in the US, and what about people in Europe, in the UK or other places?

For us, we’d kind of already made a commitment, part of our vision as it is to provide great customer service, to set the bar for great customer support. And so for us, we wanted to cover multiple time zones as quickly as we could. And so that was one of the key reasons for me in deciding to be a distributed team.

I think the second point is that personally, for me, I’m not the most productive in an office environment. I enjoy working from home, from coffee shop, and I go to the office maybe a couple of hours a day. And I think one of the great things about being a distributed team is that people can choose what their best environment is. So we will pay for a co working space if that’s if an office environment is the best thing for them. But you can choose.

The third thing is that for us, it just feels like the future. It doesn’t matter where we are. We just communicate. People can move around, and we use these tools that really help a lot. And so that’s just fun as well. And we’ve had a few times where we go down. We had a huge thing that happened about a year ago where we got hacked, and it was like a seven day process of figuring out why we like, how it happened and everything. And I think that’s a case where a lot of times you would be losing sleep and working seven days straight on the Red Bull and everything. And luckily, being a distributed team, we could, kind of like, pass the baton in a way, and someone else could wake up and take it from there. So yeah, some of the tools we use to actually make it work, we we call HipChat, our office.

We live, love HipChat, and then Squiggle, which is created by Tom, our third co founder. It’s a really, really great tool. If you distribute it in any way or have anyone remote, I can highly recommend it. So how this works is that you, the camera on your laptop takes a snapshot every five or six seconds, and it updates the picture, so you can see at a glance who else in the company is, who’s at the desk. Are they around? And then when you click somebody, you will be instantly put into a video conversation with them. So the great thing is that it removes a lot of friction, because you don’t have to answer the call.

So it’s not like Skype or where you answer it, and it’s not like Google Hangouts, where you have to set a lot up. It’s just always on. You click and you’re talking with someone. So what we found happened with Squiggle is that we end up with a lot more ad hoc conversations just a couple of minutes, just checking in on something. So I can highly recommend that.

And here’s a more colorful version. And actually, what the colors show is who you’re in a conversation with. So you can see all the conversations going on. I think this one actually was they ran out of color, so they had to start repeating ones. So we were just having some fun. It’s the first time we got everyone in the team onto Squiggle, because normally, with the time zones, not everyone’s online. But there was one time where we had everyone online. A few other tools. We use Google, apps, email, especially, and then we use Hackpad A lot.

Hackpad is great, because you can be typing and see other people typing, so you can really have a collaborative document going on, and we use Trello a lot as well. So the combination of these different tools helps us to work really well as a distributed team.

And the other thing we do, which kind of was keeping the traveling aspect within the company, I think that’s one of the key reasons as well for me to make that decision of saying, let’s keep being a distributed team. So what we do now is, we found it’s really important that we actually meet each other, even though we’re working remotely. So sometimes they can. You can go months at a time without actually having having met the person that you’re working so much with. So what we do now is every five months we have a retreat, we’ve done four so far, and we go to different places, and we hang out together for a week and a half. We work together, we have fun together, we do activities, and it’s just been really great.

I think it’s a very unique part of the culture that you don’t really get in other companies. So this is the second one we did. We were in Thailand, and this is the whole team there. You’re going to see the team growing as we go through the other retreats. And this is how I spend most of my time working whilst in Thailand.

Then we went to Cape Town, which was in April this year. And we just take the whole team there. We cover flights and accommodation and food, everything. So this is the whole team in Cape Town. And then actually last week, which is why I’m on the East Coast, we had our fourth team retreat in New York City was awesome. And this is the team now, so we’re 25 people now, and I one thing, I just wanted to share a couple of really special kind of moments that I’ve had, of realizations I’ve had, of the benefit of being a distributed team that I hadn’t really thought of before when we’re making that decision early on.

One is, this is Mary. She’s part of the customer service team, and when we went to Cape Town, actually, I did the same thing. She decided to stick around for a few weeks because it doesn’t make a difference. We work remotely. You can be wherever you want to be. So she stayed there for a few weeks. She kept working, and she learned to surf. And then after that, when she went back to back to Spokane, where she lived, and then a couple of weeks later, she decided to move to Hawaii for two months and keep working from there, and keep going and keep surfing as well. And that’s been really fun, and I think we’ve seen it happen a few times.

Someone else is originally from Sweden, and she was living in Australia when we when she first joined the team, then she decided to spend two months in Bali, working from there, then she moved back to Sweden for a little while, and then she decided to just tour around Europe for a while, and now she’s moving to San Francisco.

No Policy on Vacation

Yeah, that’s a great question. We we have like a no policy on vacation. So unlimited vacation policy, basically, you can take whatever vacation you need. You just need to let your team know that you’re going to do that and make sure it’s going to be smooth. One thing we did find is that, and I think Evernote found this as well. We were inspired by them when we we said, No, we had unlimited vacation. We found that not many people actually took vacation. And I personally didn’t take vacation for like, the first three years, and then just about two months ago, me and my co founder, Leo, we went on vacation and we found, wow, it was just incredible. Like you really need to take that time off.

So probably, someone probably could have told me that earlier, but it was great. So one thing we did was really cool. In the retreat last week, in a session, we introduced paid vacation as well. So now we pay everyone $1,000 every year to go on vacation, $1,000 per person and $500 per dependent or family members. So that’s going to be fun to see how that goes as well. Yeah.

And the other thing I wanted to share, which is really special about being a distributed team, this is Adam. He’s part of the customer service team as well. And Adam, and also someone else, Kevin in the team, has said to me a couple of times, wow. Like, I don’t have a commute anymore. He used to have an hour and a half commute each way, and he has kids that are very young and and they also have the cutest kids that I’ve come across. And he said to me, wow. Like, now I don’t have the commute and I work from home, and I get to spend time with my kids at this early age when the, you know, things change so fast. So, yeah, thanks, yeah.

So this is just something that that was one that I didn’t really think of, but it’s been really cool to see how that, how that has played out. So, yeah, I just wanted to finish. I’d love to answer a few questions now, but I wanted to finish on this with this quote again from Jason Cohen, which I think is awesome, and I think it applies to more than just the culture, but the whole idea of creating, of building a company. I think a company is just a great vehicle for just experimenting and doing things and changing things and doing what you believe is the right way to build a company. So, yeah, I think it’s important to shape the company and the culture Cool. Thank you.

Q&A

Audience Member

I’ll take this one. Hi. Joel Udi from particular software. We’re also a fully distributed team. Awesome, loving it. We’re a little bit smaller than you guys, 16-17 people. One of the challenges that we’re currently trying to figure out is the team is primarily senior, so we’ve got everybody is 30-35 plus, and now we’re looking at, okay, how do we start introducing more junior people, where we still preserve the fully distributed nature? And I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.

Joel Gascoigne 

That’s a great one. I think when we’re looking for people that can work well in a distributed in a remote position, definitely need to find that kind of self directed aspect. So one thing we’ve we have struggled also with people that are really Junior, that maybe we don’t have interns. I think it’s really hard because you’ve got to spend that extra time, but I think it’s something that would be possible once we grow a little bit more. So we try and hit that middle area where people can get on with their role and make it work well and can be self motivated. One thing that we found works really well is to find people that have had side projects or done open source or things like that in the past, because they just have that initiative and ambition to get things done by themselves. But yeah, we also struggle with that. I think we’ve not found a great solution, but I think we’re also kind of just holding off a little bit on interns. But in terms of junior, I think we’re getting towards a point where that might work.

Audience Member

Herb Cottle with Dev results are also distributed eight people. Half in Washington, DC and half elsewhere in the United States, for now, and just wondering about a couple of things that we haven’t figured out how to do with a distributed team. One is when you have people in different time zones, how you just do a weekly check in without it being at a disruptive time for somebody? And I’m not sure if we and we do that by video and obviously, but it’s not, you know, I think as we add people in weirder times. Bones, it’s going to become more of a problem. The other question is just, we’ve tried to schedule sort of hanging hanging out time where we’re just like sitting around without any structure and talking, and that also seems very hard to pull off, because it’s always at kind of an inconvenient time for for somebody. So just wondering, if you have any thoughts.

Joel Gascoigne 

Those are great questions. We’ve definitely encountered both of those. So yeah, in terms of time zones, one thing we’ve seen happen is so the engineering team is now about 10 people, and the happiness team, which is customer service, is also there is about 11 people, and in both those situations, as well as the whole company. So one thing we used to do when we were six or seven people, we used to have a daily stand up with the whole company, and we would have a Google hangout and share, you know, what we’ve been working on and any bottlenecks we have. And then we we were, I think we were seven people, and the eighth person was in Hong Kong, and immediately we had people in USA, Europe and Asia, and no one there’s no longer a good time every day, especially maybe you can do it once a month or something and ask people to be getting up early and things. But it just doesn’t work. It broke. So one thing we’ve done, so the happiness team, by now, does something where there’s kind of a three check ins a day almost, and it’s like overlapping two time zones overlap for each one, so there’s always kind of information getting carried forward. That’s one way that works.

But I think in general, we’ve started doing less of those kind of all hands style meetings, and I think it seems to work fine still for us. And I think one thing we’ve done recently, which was really great, we did a Hangout On Air, and did it at a time where hopefully most of the company could be around, but then it’s recorded, and then we emailed that out. And that’s been great as well. When we have this kind of when we’re so rigorous about the culture, we found that some of those things only emerge.

Like one little example is you’re getting dinner, and does someone thank the waiter for topping up their water or something and things like that, we want we’re looking out for, and also, just like, I think when you’re having a casual conversation, that’s when like, who you are as a person comes out more. The way that we’ve solved that is so one thing, interesting thing that happened for us, we’ve done four retreats now, and we saw correlation between doing a retreat and then immediately afterwards, in the few weeks after a retreat, we ended up firing one or two people because we’re like, wow, we’ve discovered these things and these misalignments. So we’re like, yeah, you’ve just done that, right? So yeah, we were like, crap. We’ve got to solve this in a different way.

So what we do now is our hiring process. We have four interviews, a couple of them are culture interviews, and then we have a 45 day kind of trial period where you join the team, but it’s no guarantee yet, and it’s as much for them to figure out if they feel like it’s a good fit, both on the culture side and being a distributed team, which is a new thing for a lot of people. But at the end of that 45 day period, we have we have the person meet somebody else in the team, and hopefully someone that’s been quite early in the team. So they come to San Francisco and meet me and Leo, or they’ll whoever they’re closest to, and that’s solved that a lot for us. So, and the other thing is that we do the retreats pretty regularly.

So every five months, we’re getting together, and I think that’s where we get to hang out and just, you know, we work, but we also have a lot of fun together, and that’s important to bond with each other. So think one of the things we found is after a retreat, like, for example, we had Cape Town in April with 16 of us, and then we just had the most recent one in New York was 25 so there’s nine people that had not met anyone else in the team in person. And one of the things you find is that, like, you read the emails and the hip chat differently because you know the tone of the voice, you know the gestures and things like that. So yeah, I think it’s super important. And that’s a couple of things we’ve done.

Audience Member

I just want to, just a question. I know I’ve heard you speak before about getting hacked and these sorts of things. How do you manage stress as a CEO of a company like Buffer?

Joel Gascoigne 

I go to the gym like four or five times a week. Think that helps a lot. I don’t drink. I think that’s had a big impact. Because I think one of the things is, like, I’ve been quite inspired by stoicism, where the idea is that you kind of, instead of having these huge ups and downs, which happens with startups even more so. And if you, if you go out and drink a lot, then you have this hangover. And, like, I think that’s just one example where. So I generally try and be like, instead of like this, I’ll just try and have things like bit like this, and keep it more in that range. And so yeah, and meditation is great. Like, for example, I’ll try and do it in the morning, and then I do it after lunch as well. Leo does it as well. So we have like, a few meditation cushions in the office. We just go in the conference room and do five minutes. And it’s great. It’s kind of like a reset switch in the middle of the day.

So find that it could be all kinds of crazy stuff going on that day. But then I do that right after lunchtime, and it’s just like, okay, like, you focus on your birth, you like, let the thoughts come in, but let them go out again, and then suddenly, like, feel a lot calmer and can just keep going for the rest of the day. So yeah, there’s a few things I think I still struggle a lot with that there.

Audience Member

I’ve got a question about the internationally distributed teams. How do you handle things like payroll with exchange rates that change, personal income taxes, corporate taxes, yeah, and the labor laws that affect there, it seems highly complicated for smaller companies.

Joel Gascoigne 

Yeah, that’s a great one. And for the first half of the journey I was UK based and paying taxes in the UK. So now have a visa pay tax in the US. What we do is we have payroll for everyone in the US and for everyone outside the US. Right now. We just pay them gross and then they pay their taxes. And so it’s kind of like they’re a contractor. We issue stock options for everyone. So we do ISOs for people in the US, and then NS OS for everyone else. It’s definitely a complicated thing. We have a great firm called foresight who help us out a lot with with that stuff. There was a point when I was individual, like personally doing all the wire transfers for everyone every month. But it was not, it was a, don’t be like whole day.

So yeah, I think maybe we might get to a point where we start to have, like subsidiaries in different countries. But right now we only have, it’s usually like one or two people in each place. So it’s not quite at the point where it would make sense for us to do that those people might leave or things could happen. So yeah, that’s generally how we do it. People pay their own tax.

Mark Littlewood 

Thank you, Joel.

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