Wade Foster & Amir Salihefendic: Reflections on Growing a Remote Company in a Pandemic

You might be forgiven for thinking that companies who were already operating remotely pre-2020 went on to have an easier ride over the 2021 and 2022.

To a small extent that’s true: companies like Zapier who’ve been operating remotely for a decade didn’t have to work out how to work and hire remotely.

In practice though, even remote-first companies experienced huge productivity hits during the pandemic. After all, working remotely pre-2020 did not typically involve being locked up in your home nor did it usually involve equally frustrated partners, kids, and babies breathing down your neck.

Zapier’s Wade Foster, together with Doist CEO Amir Salihefendic talk online about Reflections on Growing a Remote Company in a Pandemic.

They share and compare their experiences leading and growing remote-first companies: both before, during, and after the pandemic.

Transcript

Amir Salihefendic
I’m Amir. I’m the founder and CEO of Doist. I’ve been at Doist for almost 14 years now, so I really plan to do this for many more years. Yeah. And we basically do Bertini software. We are about 100 people fully distributed, we have been fully distributed since day one. And personally, I was born in Bosnia, I grew up in Denmark and am currently living in Barcelona.

Wade Foster
I’m one of the co founders/CEO at Zapier. I haven’t been doing this quite as long as Amir, I’ve been at it about a decade now. For those who don’t know Zapier is an easy automation between all the different tools you might use at work. We slack integrations, Gmail, Salesforce, MailChimp, you name it, we can connect you up to pretty much anything.

I’m based in the Midwest, spent about the last decade in California but came back to the Midwest recently. I’ve got a 10 month old daughter and wanted to be a little closer to some family. So I took the pandemic as an opportunity to get a little closer to home. At Zapier, we’re a little over 400 people now, about two thirds of us are in the United States. The third outside the United States, I think we have folks in maybe 30-35 countries, something like that. Our goal is to make automation easy for everyone. We feel like when you hear automation talked about in the mainstream media, it’s this scary thing that’s coming for your job. But we think that automation can be something that’s for you, that’s a helpful sidekick for tackling all that mundane routine work that you have to do on a day to day basis and allow you to spend time on the things that you’re best at, the creative work that I think really fills a lot of us up. And so hopefully, if we do our job right, we can make software that gives people a lot of time and creative energy back to themselves.

Amir Salihefendic
And for us our own mission is to invent the future of work. I know a lot of people say this but we really want to do this on a more significant level. Because honestly, I think the way that we work and live is kind of broken right now. So that’s our belief: the current system is broken, we want to create something that’s much better. And we’re like the pushing for asynchronous first for many years now. Before that, it was kind of remote first. Now it’s asynchronous first that we’re pushing. But it seems like the memo isn’t really getting through yet. But we see some people kind of jumping on this. And Zapier is also asynchronous first, has been for many years, and we see bigger companies doing this as well. But it’s still super niche.

The implications of fully distributed, of remote first and of asynchronous first, I think are much, much bigger than people actually believe. For instance, one of the big things is helping people change their life. If you live in some kind of country where maybe you don’t have opportunities. And then you can get an amazing job at a remote company, that could not change only your life, but the life of your family or your community. And I think we’re moving in that direction. Given how the salaries work in these remote companies is like: we pay maybe 10x 20x of what they will get if they work for a local company. So I think there’s all kinds of opportunities that are being built here. And this is much bigger than just people working on a computer in a remote area.

Mark Littlewood
Interesting. So let’s talk about asynchronous because I think everyone’s familiar in some respect about remote and you’ve both talked at BoS in the past about how you make remote work. But one of the things that I I maybe didn’t appreciate – and I’m sure other people have – is this big difference between asynchronous work and synchronous work. And I suppose that’s really demonstrated in your product Amir: Twist. Slack I find incredibly difficult to deal with. I have ADHD, and I just don’t know where to start. Although, interestingly, for some people with ADHD, they absolutely love it. But I think that’s because it’s just a massive distraction. Twist is very different. It’s built with asynchronous in mind, what do you both take asynchronous to mean, and why is it so important for you?

Amir Salihefendic
I think, we think very similarly on this topic. Something that, for me is very hard to understand is the current environment that most people find themselves in, and this real time chat in meetings all the time. And I don’t think this is the kind of environment that is required to do the deep work that is required. So if you do any writing, any thinking, you know, any coding, designing, you really need to be concentrated. And we have created these empty concentration environments, and most people are just on them. And I understand why this is happening. Because it’s very addictive, so real time chat is much more addictive than asynchronous communication. You get dopamine hits. And even in meetings, you’re just rambling, and brainstorming and talking. It feels like you’re getting real work done.

My background is in engineering, so I know where the real work is being done is when I’m deeply thinking about something. So for us, it’s kind of about challenging this environment and creating a new environment where the default way to work is like deep work, where the default way is like concentrated work. And not where the default way is just spending 75% of time distracted, and then you have these small chunks of time where you can actually really do the critical stuff. So that’s really how we think about asynchronous.

Yeah. And it’s very strange that more people aren’t promoting this. Because I think if you look at the results, I can’t imagine synchronous, real time, stressed, distracted, not being able to disconnect, would be the default way that most people would prefer to do things. The best work, I don’t think it’s created this way.

Wade Foster
Yeah, I think one of the things I think many of us are familiar with is this concept of Zoom fatigue, that we’ve sort of experienced over the last year. And I think this sort of emerges from this shift of trying to take the office environment and move it to a remote environment. You know, at the office, you’ve moved from conference room to conference room, taking meetings, and you’re like: ‘Well, what does the remote version of that look like?’ Well, it’s that you’re on Zoom all day.

I think that highlights how efficient and effective that working style can be. Because you never get a chance to step back and really address some of the core tasks that are in front of you and really make super good progress against those things. And so being able to set up your organisation where it does create a lot of free time in your schedule to be able to tackle that work is really important. And an asynchronous is a way you can do that. As a manager, you can say: ‘Hey, I don’t necessarily need to distract my employees by asking them to get on a zoom call. Instead, I can say, “Hey, can you just in the next 24 hours or 48 hours, reply to this thing?”‘ And that then gives your workforce the ability to use their own choice in how they spend their time, they can say, ‘Hey, my mornings are going to be spent in deep work and really trying to address these big blocks that I need to tackle and then maybe in the afternoon, I’m going to catch up on all the correspondence that I need to tackle with my teammates and things like that.’ And so, that shift to thinking about: what do you really need real time? What do you really need as a manager right away versus how much of the stuff is just ‘Hey, I just need to know, within some reasonable amount of time.’ And then giving your employees the ability to use their own judgement on when to give that to you creates a lot of flexibility inside your organisation.

So I think that’s one really powerful thing, if you shift to asynchronous work, you get that and you should get better work out of your team.

Now, one challenge that we’ve learned in running a remote organisation for a long time now is that one of the big hurdles you have in a remote environment is loneliness and disconnection from your team. And so if you take asynchronous to the nth degree and say: ‘I’m never going to get on Zoom with anybody, I’m gonna hide behind a chat window or an email box.’ The work becomes very transactional, and it can become a very lonely experience. And so we found at Zapier, that, one of the most important things that meetings actually provide is not necessarily discussing work, or status updates, or things like that, it really is just about human relationships and human connection.

I was on an AMA last week with the CEO of Team building.com. And he specialises in team building, and he had this great little line which was: ‘I think that 8% of all meetings should be dedicated to fun, and just really getting to know people.’ And if you’re wondering why it’s 8%, it’s because five minutes in an hourly meeting is 8%. So it just takes five minutes, usually at the kickoff to, ask people: ‘Hey, what was something cool that you did this weekend?’ Or, you know, fun little icebreaker questions. You know, sometimes this stuff can feel a bit cheesy and stilted. But once you start doing that a little bit, you find teams open up, get to know each other a little bit better. And you can start building some of those relationships. And that certainly, I think, has been something that we’ve reaffirmed over the last year, in part because we haven’t been able to get together in person, that having some synchronous time dedicated to just getting to know your teammates is really, really important.

And so if you’re relying on an asynchronous environment, for a lot of the work, I think it makes it possible that your synchronous time can have some of this stuff to it. But if you’re sort of always wall to wall on like important meeting, important meeting, important meeting, important meeting, you just never really have time for both deep work and relationship building, which I think are two things that are really important in any workplace.

Amir Salihefendic
Wade that was super insightful, because actually some years ago, we did no meetings. Everything was asynchronous. And honestly, this isn’t a really great environment. And especially some more extroverted people they were like: ‘There’s no human-like connection left here. It’s just like texting.’

Wade Foster
I think it was in Wired a few years back, I saw something that said that one of the biggest purposes of workplace meetings for folks is actually like workplace therapy, basically. And I think at the time, I was like: ‘Ugh, humans who need therapy.’ But now thinking back on that, I’m like: ‘You know what, actually, I think that’s actually a really good thing. There’s nothing wrong with humans that want to be connected with other people.’ We’ve been in a pandemic for a year and I think we can all relate to how important those connections are to other people. And so being able to create those in a remote environment, I have found to be really important.

Mark Littlewood
So what’s your best one? How about you demonstrate this in real time? Give us an example of something that you might want to do.

Wade Foster
I’ll give you one that I learned last week. So this was from the team building guy. His icebreaker was: if you had to haunt one location for the rest of your life, what would you choose? Where would you choose to haunt? That was the icebreaker.

Haunt like a ghost. So I’ll go first and that way you can have a second to think. So I wouldn’t take the haunting part super seriously. I would take the location part really seriously. And so one of my favourite places is Kauai the island on Hawaii. I think it’s just beautiful. And so I would choose to haunt but in the sense of Casper the Friendly Ghost style. So I would just float around people’s vacations and get shaved ice with them and stuff like that on Kauai because I think I can hang out there for forever.

Mark Littlewood
That’s very cool. Amir?

Amir Salihefendic
My first thought was more like a black hat system? That way I don’t need to do a real life haunting.

Mark Littlewood
So let’s introduce an element, something we share in the chat. Where in the world? Does it have to be in the world?

Wade Foster
I think you can pick whatever you want, you can pick a fictional place, you know if you wanted to haunt, I don’t know, Hogwarts, I guess you could do that.

Mark Littlewood
Plenty of people do. So we’ll give people another 20 seconds just to think about that and get ready to type into the chat and then try that. Marco Montes is already off to Ibiza.

So everybody ready? We’re gonna go 123 Go. Wow, there’s a few cemeteries, number 10 Downing Street. Who was that? Excellent.

So, let’s get back to this asynchronous thing. And one of the things that both of you have experienced over the last year is you’ve been growing. You’ve been continuing to onboard people. What have been the challenges of doing that for you in a different sort of world? And how do you go about your growth and thinking about growth? Because there’s obviously less chance to – even for a remote company – get together and do retreats and things? How are you? How are you maintaining your culture? What are you doing differently to keep things sustainable?

Wade Foster
Yeah, for us, I think we were fortunate in that we had really established a pretty strong onboarding process for new Zapiens joining the company, beforehand. And I can share briefly sort of how we have it set up and why we do it that way. We onboard folks and cohorts together. So every two weeks, we have a batch of new people that start together, generally 5 to 10 people on a Monday, we’ll all start in a cohort group together. And they go through a mix of self guided onboarding, mixed with live classroom style experiences. So it sort of mixes that synchronous/asynchronous onboarding experience together.

It’s really focused on two-three things.

One is really getting to know Zapier, our mission, our vision, our values, who we are as a company, what we believe in, what we’re trying to do, how we go about work, that kind of stuff. So there’s a lot of written material and there’s a founder meet and greet, I teach a class on feedback. There’s stuff like that, that really tries to help people sort of ease into the culture. So that’s sort of bucket one of things that we do.

Bucket two is all the tactical stuff that you care about onboarding, it’s where your tools are, where your password manager is at, here’s how your health insurance is, here’s how your payroll works, all that sort of stuff. Mostly, that is self guided, but there are some like AMA sessions with our HR team that helps clarify a lot of that work, which is useful because this stuff is easy to overlook, but can be really stressful for people. There’s always a lot of what people will call ‘stupid questions’, but they’re not stupid. It’s like: ‘Hey, I need to get paid. So I need to have this question answered for me so that I can properly get my paycheck each week.’ Not a stupid question. But people always self describe it that way.

And then I think the last thing is a sense of community and camaraderie is a big reason why we onboard folks in cohorts, so that they’re joining with a group of other people into the company together. That way, these people sort of go through their Zapier experience already as a little bit of a pack and, these folks can be in all different levels and different roles in the company. You know, we’ll have a VP joining at the same time as someone in customer support or like someone over in marketing. And you’ll see these people, at our retreats or in Slack, they have a dedicated channel, they’ll sort of circle back to each other and be like a little bit of a support group for each other, going through their journey. Again it’s really, really important when you’re joining a remote company, you don’t necessarily have that cohesion and connection into a broader set of folks, unless you’re designing this intentionally out the gate. Otherwise, your manager really is the only connection point you might have into the company. So we find this cohort style of onboarding to be really effective at getting people into the organisation. So that’s sort of how we have it set up.

The big thing that we found to be challenging or perhaps more challenging in the last year or so has simply just been expectations around time commitments and things like that. When you’ve got someone who’s joining the company who can only be working part time because the other part time they’re doing childcare. There’s just stuff like that, where every manager and leader in the company just has to be a little bit more on their toes, in terms of thinking about this stuff, and be a little bit more flexible and accommodating for people. And just thinking through, how do I help this person while also still getting some of these key objectives and goals met? I don’t know that we have a perfect answer for that other than just: ‘Talk, talk talk.’ We just keep encouraging people to share your experience, so that we can just keep problem solving alongside everybody else together. But that’s how we’ve approached onboarding at Zapier.

Mark Littlewood
Of those three buckets, how much time was spent on each of them?

Wade Foster
So the community camaraderie piece is this undercurrent, like it’s designed such that people go through all of these things together. And so that is sort of a shared experience all the time. And then the other two buckets, I’d say are split fairly evenly.

Mark Littlewood
Thank you. Amir?

Amir Salihefendic
Well, we haven’t reached this stage yet where we can actually have a cohort of people joining. We have always been not very aggressive in terms of hiring. So if you cannot hire, we prefer to do that, because, more people more problems. Yeah, but in general I will do something very similar to Wade.

Some things that we do that could be maybe inspirational is, we have a mentor that’s attached to the person. And usually – in non COVID – you visit your mentor for a week or two, where you actually live with them. So people have lived across the world. And then it can be a very nice experience for people not only to get into Doist but also you get into another culture, you meet another person and you get much closer. And it’s usually your Team Leader. Or sometimes it’s not. Actually like as you grow, it usually is not, it’s basically another person from the team. So that’s one aspect that I think it could be inspiring.

The second one, and this is also something that we’ve actually got inspired by GitLab is like, we have gotten, like all in on the handbook thing. So basically, I think like over the last maybe year or two, we have had like 1000s of pages committed to a handbook. So basically, when a person joins in, you basically have like a bible or whatever religion you like Quran, you know, of like the Doist culture and how we do stuff. And this like actually being adopted by most teams, like initially started by engineering teams, but then like, People Ops came in finance came in marketing. And right now like everything is kind of like handbook first approach. So that’s another aspect.

The third aspect is basically transparency. So something to note about, especially the Doist culture, and also some other companies that I talk to, like for instance, GitLab is a great example. And I’m pretty sure that you as well, I’m actually not sure if like transparency is a big thing, but most things are accessible by default in Doist. I think the only thing that isn’t actually accessible is like salaries and I think this is kind of a mistake. So if you’re actually starting out I would actually recommend just going for like transparent salaries. Transparent formula for this. And this also means like a new person can basically join in any channel see any discussion, this or like most discussions, this includes like leadership strategy, like anything they want to, you know, I think like for Doist itself like we have posted like over 1.5 like million messages inside twist and like most of these public and searchable. Yeah. So I think like that’s something that you can also promote just like transparency. And this makes onboarding much easier.

Mark Littlewood
Talk to me a little bit about salaries because you have people all the way around the world, there are just about as many different ways of cutting this as there are people working remotely. How do you how do you think about it? And other things that are hard about that?

Amir Salihefendic
Yeah, I can start and then you can…

Wade Foster
Yeah! I’d like to know how you solve this one Amir!

Amir Salihefendic
Yeah, I mean, honestly, like, you know, where we want to go, is we want to actually go towards, like global salaries. Because I think that’s where the market will go. Like, if you just think at this, you know, just like a marketplace, I think like, if you pay local salaries, you will just not be able to compete, like for the best talent, because somebody will just be able going going hire that person and give them like much better compensation than you.

Of course, like salary isn’t really the only reason why people join companies. But you know, I think we’re still not there, but we can actually do this in a great way. So, cost of living is still an issue, especially, you know, if you have somebody like living on an island, somewhere, where the cost of living is like very low, and then you have somebody living in like, you know, like New York or whatever else, like, you know, they will not be able to get, like, if you pay just like global salaries and not high salaries, you will not be able to get a like, have a great life in New York. So for us, it’s also like looking at how can we like pay, so people can live a great life, regardless of where they are.

So our formula is basically we peg it to the US market, because it’s kind of the the market that is like the most competitive in the world in terms of salaries. And then we also have, like a cost of living a variable that can add probably 30% more, depending on where you live. Yeah. And in the end we will actually love to decrease this and just increase our base salaries a lot. So in the end our goal is basically to pay the highest salary, we can pay, because honestly, like, I think like the competition will not be like an amount of people you have, especially for a software company, but more like the quality of people that you have. And then like in the end, like, you know, the salary that you pay, maybe isn’t really that relevant. Yeah.

Mark Littlewood
Wade, I remember you talked about this a few years ago, and I remember you saying you just hired someone in the middle of London and actually, they were attracted by the high salary that you were paying with respect to what they were used to, rather than kind of remote work and flexible living. What’s your approach?

Wade Foster
I think there’s a few approaches you can take, you know, obviously, salaries are very much a sort of market driven phenomenon. And so, you know, there’s a lot of companies that take the like, Hey, we’re gonna like really be sort of very aggressive and trying to be a just on a Market to Market basis, because by and large, the way salaries have worked are, you know, city by city.

But with the emergence of remote work, like it’s creating this higher level market, which is a sort of more global remote work thing that has its own sort of set of things, but it’s very emergent right now. And it’s hard to get a feel on exactly what that is, you know, when you go to talk to like Radford, or Impact Option, or any of these folks that provide salary data, they always do it on a, hey, what’s the pay ranges for XYZ and these areas? There’s not really a, what does it look like for remote yet?

Our philosophical approach has been to shift closer to, same role, same pay, but the place where this gets tricky is outside of the US in different countries. By and large, the way we look at it is same job, same pay in the same country.

The reason that same country piece is important is because of a couple of things.

One its employment laws and benefits are very different country to country and how people approach what you get from the government is is very different in the United States versus in many like EU countries. And so that is a very real factor.

The second thing is currency fluctuations are also very real. And so your employees tend to want a stable salary, they don’t want to have their income jumping around based on a global currency bar that’s jumping. So we tend to say, hey, you know, if you’re employed in X country, this is what our ranges look like. We do our best to make those equal-ish. But who defines equal? It’s really, really hard the deeper we’ve gotten into this to sort of problem space, it gets very, very complicated very quickly is the honest reaction. So I think everyone has to define the philosophy they feel comfortable with for themselves. I think if you can articulate it really well you’re going to be ahead of most folks.

Mark Littlewood
How much has your approach to salaries changed over the last five years, I mean, as you get more complicated, presumably, it gets more complex?

Wade Foster
For us, the more the company has grown, the higher salaries we’re able to pay. So that simplifies some things. You don’t feel that same pressure to the early days. I gotta find talent and scratch and claw because I can’t necessarily pay market rates. And so you’re really trying to do geographic arbitrage is very much a real thing. When you’re sort of sub 10-20 people. As you get bigger, that becomes less of an issue. And so you’re okay saying I’m just gonna pay good wages across the board, regardless of how that happens. But it becomes much more, much more, about how do you explain that story to your employee base when you have a big employee base? They’re going to want to know that they’re compensated fairly and equitably. They want to understand what does it take for me to grow my compensation for my impact? All that sort of stuff. You need to establish a more firm philosophy. I think that’s one thing we’ve gotten a lot better at talking about internally over time.

Amir Salihefendic
For us, it’s very similar. Something that is similar for both Zapier and Doist is we’re bootstrapped. So this means initially, we probably started off with very low salaries, at least for Doist that was something and we couldn’t just go in and hire, from every region. Probably one of the reasons why we don’t have a lot of folks in the US. We’re starting to hire more now. Initially, it was very, very hard to hire people from the US because the salaries were very high compared to Europe or wherever else in the world. I think it’s also depends on the company structure if you bootstrap or not – what kind of capital you have. That probably also dictates the salary that the you have. I honestly, I’m very impressed by the early hires we did. I have no clue how we could hire hire those type of people because the salaries were ridiculously low. So yeah, if you’re starting out, you need to be very creative. Maybe more mission than salary is the key.

Mark Littlewood
Is everybody employed in one way or another through the organisation? Or do you have certain countries where you have contractors or is there a model where you contract and then as you get a critical mass of people set up an entity?

Wade Foster
What you just described is pretty close to how we go about it, Mark. In al lot of countries we were able to employ these contractors, and then reaches a point where it does need to tilt over to creating entities there. There’s a lot more companies these days that make it easier to employ internationally, there’s things like remote.com, ShieldGEO and whatnot that allow you to have employer of record setups in a bunch of different countries. Those can be useful mechanisms for you.

This is where a good accountant and a good lawyer goes a long way. You really want to just understand what your responsibilities are, and all these places that you’re employing folks. And you want to understand what risk you’re taking if you choose not to be in compliance with some of those local things. It’s not always clear what compliance looks like to be honest. Many of these countries are complicated and they don’t have a good record of articulating what employment should look like in those regions or not. It’s definitely a grey area here that I think everyone is figuring out together right now.

Mark Littlewood
So Amir, I guess this is less of an issue for you, when you’re looking at compensation. I’m assuming you don’t do stock options or anything similar in the business, you might have some kind of profit share, but your your intent is never to sell. So in a way, if you’re giving people or making equity part of your compensation plan, it’s almost a con, because there’s not much point in giving people equity if you’re not gonna sell. Wade, I think you’re a little different in that you had some shareholders early on that actually were bought out recently? Do you have a slightly different approach?

Amir Salihefendic
Mark? Could I just add something here. We do have a stock option plan. And 25% of the equity will be given to the employees. And the reason for this is like, you know, you’re creating like, enormous value. And I think it’s just very selfish to say, I own everything. I don’t know, a lot of people don’t really think about this, but you’re not going to get wealthy on a paycheck. So from my perspective, it’s a question of how do I align the companies goal with the people’s goal in the end. If we make something big, everybody will benefit from this, instead of just like having a few people, or even, in most cases some founders, investors, and maybe some early employees that benefit. So that’s my perspective.

In regards to selling out, there’s a lot of different structures you can do. You have some companies, Atlassian, is a great example. They became public, they’re, I don’t know, a $50-100 billion dollar market cap right now. The founders have now lost control and they have made the employees very wealthy. So I think there’s also a lot of options as well for a bootstrapped, independent company to go public, or do something. I think in the future, blockchains and stuff like that will maybe have other options to make the stock liquid and have a marketplace for it. So that’s at least my two cents.

I stand stand corrected. Thank you. Wade.

Wade Foster
Yeah, similar to Amir. I agree that allowing people to participate in the ownership economy is a really important thing for creating wealth. It’s one of the things I’ve gotten to experience growing Zapier over the last decade, is you appreciate what that sort of compounding growth can look like. We are in the process of expanding what our option pool looks like, and making sure that as many people inside the company can participate in that as possible. A big part of this, again, is compliance in all these different countries, because different countries approach this stuff very differently. The key thing we’re trying to work out right now is how can we get more people to be able to participate in it by just understanding what is possible and all the places that we have, folks.

Mark Littlewood
Just when you thought you’d sorted your compensation out, you have another several layers of complexity!

Wade Foster
The hidden cost of running a very global company is definitely compliance and regulatory challenges. I’m really rooting for these companies like remote.com and so forth, because I think that they’re definitely working on a massive problem space. I think the more they can make that easy for folks, it’s going to it’s going to pay off hugely for folks trying to build organisations.

Mark Littlewood
So when the pair of you and I were talking about this session, we thought there’sa really soft question, “What do you most admire about the other person’s business?’ The much better and more interesting question thought is, “What have you noticed about the other person’s company that you think kind of sucks?” I do that so differently. So what do look atand ask why are they doing it like that?

Wade Foster
I think one thing I can talk about when I’m envious of Amir, one of the things you’ve done really well is like your commitment to asynchronous is very good. I’ve seen your Twitter posted screenshots of your calendar from time to time, and I see that and I’m like, dang, man, he really has that working good, where he just has so much time in his week to spend on deep work. And I’m constantly trying to get closer to that, but I never never quite make it as far as Amir does. So I certainly have envy on that. I’ll have to think about the thing I think that you do is not so good.

Mark Littlewood
Amir asked me to ask this question! It’s got 10 of them now.

Amir Salihefendic
I mean, honestly, for me, it’s just the scale that Zapier operates at. It’s something that I would love to get to that stage as well. I think the bigger the scale, the bigger the impact that you can have potentially. Yeah, so for me, that’s something that I wouldn’t say envy, but I really want to emulate. And things that could have been improved. I don’t know. I think it’s very hard to like improve the execution of Zapier, if you know a bit about them, or the numbers. Yeah. So I think probably, yeah, wait, even if I say something, I shouldn’t probably the policeman for me!

Just keep to continue doing what you’re doing.

Mark Littlewood
There’s a few questions around asynch. Chris Arnold, I don’t know if you’re there and want to ask?

Audience Member
I’m happy to ask the question. So working asynchronously, we love the idea. Deep work is very valuable. But then, how do you manage the change between async and synch? Because not everybody has the luxury of just being able to be completely async checking in whenever they feel like it. The main one for us is engineering teams that also need to support the products that they build. And how do they create that balance without feeling that they’re there? They just on call all the time, even when they’re trying to do deep work? So yeah, thanks.

Mark Littlewood
Yeah, there’s a few other questions around how do you transition to asynch? Because it sounds great all this time, particularly now, when people seem to be busier than ever, but…

Amir Salihefendic
I think something to note. We think about async as a kind of pyramid, where underneath, you have an async layer, that’s kind of the default way to communicate, then you have like the one on one meetings, or like team meetings, or whatever else you have. So maybe it’s 70%, you have the underlying complications as async. And then at the top, you have numbers, and we also have a Telegram group. So, if shit hits the fan, engineering things are down, you call people. So that’s what we do. But honestly, like, we have the system and most of the time, we don’t use it. I think maybe we use it once or twice per year or something like that. It’s very infrequent.

But the thing is, if you have the default way as you ring to call people, real time communication, then you have an engineering organisation that’s very stressed. So for us at least, that’s how we do. We have a way to signal when things are really, really bad and the people need to come online.

Wade Foster
Yeah, similar. I think like rotations can be really powerful here for engineering teams in particular.

So just simply having like those on call rotations means that there’s a dedicated person that does not get distracted. And it provides a buffer for folks to be heads down on that. So that’s certainly one way.

Second thing is simply just owning your work a little bit here too. If you’re a person who owns a bit of the codebase and you keep shipping buggy stuff you should own the fact that you ship buggy stuff. That’s going to mean you get distracted to come fix that stuff up.I think having that sort of ownership is a really powerful mechanism to make sure that folks are committed to quality in the software that they’re building. If they do it well, that means, hey, we get more time to build more quality stuff. But if we’re shipping stuff in a shoddy way, that might mean that we’re getting called in on the regular to sort of see this thing through.

Those are like a few things, I think, there. Then there’s definitely a global cultural commitment to it that I think is important. This is what I think has been maybe our toughest hurdle. We have just scaled a lot in the last few years and constantly training and getting folks acclimated to an environment that does like to work asynchronously is hard.

People will join your company with a bunch of habits, some of those habits are good, but some of those habits are maybe not good and getting people to break those habits can be challenging, especially if you’re bringing in leaders that have those habits. Those leaders can often expose those bad habits to the rest of the team.

Audience Member
Question for both of you, basically, talking about the do’s on one side of things but, obviously, the don’ts is the other. I was just wondering, are there things that you’ve done while getting to where you are, that didn’t work? Or maybe looking at a different way? If you want to mess it up? You’ve obviously got successful companies, if you really wanted to mess it up, what would you do?

Wade Foster
One of the things I think that we were maybe the overly optimistic about was the impact of time zones. I think, early on, we had some early experiences with hiring folks, you know, in pretty diverse time zones, far reaching time zones from us. And the impact of that was relatively small. In fact, those folks were immediately very high impact teammates. I remember the first 5-10, folks were all hired in the States but then we’d hired someone in the UK. We hired someone in Thailand. Things were going great. And so, at times, our problem was our takeaway from that.

I think later on, we had some much harder sort of things to deal with around time zones, where we were onboarding someone who’s team was in Europe or the United States and they were in APAC region. They struggled. We just didn’t have the onboarding and support system set up very well for that person. It just didn’t work. I think that caused us to step back and reflect a little bit more on where time zones can be useful, and how does this asynchronous stuff really help? But recognising sometimes, especially early on, in your experience you do need a little more hand holding and having some of that timezone overlap to do some of that synchronous work and go a long way. So I think that was one learning that we’ve had. And it’s still something that I don’t know. A lot of companies have really strong philosophies around time zones, we don’t necessarily have that. We have some guidelines, I think, is how we sort of approach it. And I don’t know it works. To be honest, I think we still are learning a little bit. We’re optimistic about being a very global company, but there is a very real hurdle that you have to deal with when you’re collaborating with folks in different time zones. So that’s one thing that comes to mind for me. Amir, how about you?

🕣 🕕 🕓 🕐

Amir Salihefendic
Yeah. Given that we are very much asynchronous first across the whole thing, time zones are not a issue yet. But definitely, meetings become much harder to schedule and stuff. You need to ruin somebody’s morning or night.

As you scale the company, I think, you basically reach a point where everything is kind of falling apart, and you don’t really understand why. And then, the wrong thing is basically to continue doing what you’re doing. So that’s a signal that you need to change something. For us, for instance, we had huge issues like productivity, just like shipping stuff and stuff like that. We couldn’t really understand it. We had so many more people but shipped less when we actually doubled the amount of people and the reason is we didn’t really have any of the processes in place to support more people.

Something I’ve just heard and experienced myself is these are very natural. You need stages where things are just falling apart. You need to figure out, what do I need to change here? For us, the mistake was basically accepting the status quo and not changing stuff – just being stubborn with the stuff that we’re doing. I think something that held us back initially was flat hierarchy. We don’t really want to have a hierarchy inside the company. But that isn’t really a great way to scale a company.

Mark Littlewood
One thing I’d love to do is how you approach taking on inexperienced people, what percentage of the people that you’re employing are coming into your organisations in the first job?

Wade Foster
For us, it’s relatively few To be honest, I think one of the things that remote is one of the perks is that you are able to get folks who have some experience, that doesn’t mean that they’re decades long veterans of the space, but usually folks joining us after have had a job or two. And that has been nice, because we don’t have to teach people basic employment etiquette type things. Like, Hey, it’s important that you show up, it’s important that you communicate, you don’t have to teach those things. So there’s a level of experience that has been useful there.

I would say over time, honestly, though, we’ve probably been a little bit better at hiring inexperienced folks earlier on than we have been later. I think that’s mostly just a side effect of, early on, I was in the weeds on a lot of the work so it was easier to take a chance on somebody who was inexperienced, because you could see, this is the skills that they really need to have. Versus, as you’re scaling up, oftentimes, you’re looking for past experience, having done some of this stuff, because you’re trying to go quickly, you’re trying to scale up fast. And so just having somebody that has done a thing before is a way to go quicker at some of this stuff. So not not to say that we don’t hire inexperienced, we have a lot of entry level jobs at Zapier, but I would say earlier on as a percentage of new roles. More work sort of lower level earlier on.

Amir Salihefendic
Yeah, I mean, honestly, for us, I think we have a huge issue here. We have tried to hire like more junior people. We need to do a huge amounts of investment, in terms of time to bring somebody on the level that we need them at. So for some people, it’s years of dedicated work. And this is why we don’t really do this, because we don’t really have resources to allocate to this. You know, so that’s kind of our excuse, but I think it’s a lame excuse. Because honestly, I think diversity is still an issue. So if you look at these remote first companies, it’s mostly, European, European ancestry, people that get hired. If you look at any kind of remote company, you will see that it’s not really diverse. It reflects still, the non diversity that is in tech. I think this is a huge issue. And of course, the problem is, this has been brought up many times. When we do a job posting, we get 85% US or Europe applications. We’re trying to go in and hire from otherregions. But it’s still very hard to get people to submit or even find the talent. So honestly, I think something that we plan to do once we have more resources is basically allocate more towards this. Maybe do a university, similar to Shopify. But yeah, like, you need to be a huge player to do this. So maybe wait, that’s a good idea for Zapier soon.

Mark Littlewood
Isn’t hiring more diversely in everybody’s best interest? There’s people at all sorts of stages in remote work and this is one of those things that comes up time and time. Maybe there is some way of pulling some resources together and providing some input from a number of companies, because at the moment, it feels like, you’re able to compete in a very specific way with a very specific group of group people. But really training and training and teaching people how to how to work if the whole world is remote, is only going to get a bigger, bigger challenge. For the pioneers like you, you’re going to be in a situation where you can almost cherry pick the great talent that’s looking for different ways of doing things. But there is going to come a time when we need to, we need to rethink all sorts of elements of that. When you’re recruiting for remote working a synchronous people, what are the kind of top two things that you are really looking for in somebody that are leading indicators of them being successful in your own organisations?

Wade Foster
For us, I think the big thing is we want folks that are action oriented self starters. Independently motivated. So we’re just really in the interviewing process, asking a lot of behavioural interview questions, “Tell me about a time when x?” We’re just trying to listen for when they demonstrate that stuff in the past. If they have a history of just sort of spotting problems, being curious, tackling hard things, all that sort of stuff. And that generally is a good hint that they could be successful in a remote environment, even if they’ve never done it before.

I guess most people have done it now in the last year. So total inexperience is usually not a thing anymore, but those are the types of things that we listen for. We’re not too worried about tonnes of remote experience. Even pre pandemic it was not something we cared too much about, because it just was pretty rare. And I think you limit yourself if you make that a specific requirement. Rather, I think you’re just trying to pick up on those tendencies for folks who, who could do well in that type of environment given the opportunity.

Amir Salihefendic
Yeah, so for us, it’s very similar. One of our core values is independence. This is super critical in an environment where you are just fully distributed, because you will be blocked a lot of times, you will not really be able to be micromanaged as well. So independence is really critical. So that’s one thing that we also really, really focus on. The other thing that I think is super critical, especially for our asynchronous first environment is communication, especially written communication. People really need to write. To be able to write well, because in this enviroment, that’s the way that you’re going to present an idea or get people aligned or bought in on the direction. It’s really a written form. So this is super critical for us. Yeah.

Wade Foster

CEO and co-Founder, Zapier

Wade is the CEO and co-founder of Zapier (rhymes with happier), a workflow automation tool used by over 1.5 million people to connect the work apps they use every day. 

Wade studied business and engineering at University of Missouri-Columbia before  Zapier raised $1 million seed funding in 2012 after graduating from Y-Combinator where he was told his idea was nice – but not big enough. Zapier is a fully remote, profitable business employing over 350 people across 35 countries – they’re just humans who think computers should do more work. Zapier has taken no further investment though some original investors, though not the founders, recently sold their holdings at a reported $5billion valuation.  

Amir Salihefendic

Amir is the CEO and founder of remote-first company Doist, the company behind Todoist, and Twist.

Born in Bosnia, he grew up in Denmark, started the business in South America and now lives in Barcelona, Spain and Santiago, Chile. Doist was founded in 2007, has received $0 of outside investment, employs over 120 people in 30 different countries.

He believes a product stands a better chance of resonating with a global workforce when people around the world create it. For him, working remotely is the way of the future. He does not know what the next decade will bring, but it won’t include selling out or getting acquired. Amir doesn’t have an exit strategy – he has a mission to help shape the future of work for decades to come

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