RWL058 How to Balance Leading a Remote-First Company Without Sacrificing Your Passions w/ Job van der Voort, CEO of Remote

Interview With Remote Work CEO

Speaker 1

0:00

Skype. There you go.

Speaker 2

0:03

Thank you Okay. Have you got the questions? Are the questions okay? Anything that you want to ask me at all.

Speaker 1

0:13

You know, when people send me the questions, I don't read them Because it just makes me start to think what to answer. And, like I prefer to be authentic, Exactly so. I like surprises. I'm quick on my feet.

Speaker 2

0:26

I should be okay that is music to my ears, because the next question I was going to ask you do you mind having some on the spot questions?

Speaker 1

0:32

so no, I love it. That's you know. To be completely frank, I get the same questions daily, so you know, and then I try to vary a little bit my answers and I don't feel, like you know, I'm repeating myself too much. But, no, I like interesting, hard questions. I don't know If I don't want to answer something. I'm also very comfortable just telling you, but it has not happened, Okay.

Speaker 2

0:57

Okay, I'll bear that in mind as I try to think of some hard questions in my head at the moment.

Speaker 1

1:01

Yeah, go for it.

Speaker 2

1:09

Yeah, hard questions in my head. Yeah, go for it. Yeah, excellent, excellent, okay, so let's get kicked off. Then let me um close that down, because looks like my internet is not doing so good today. Um, right, and I pronounce your name, york. Yeah, it's perfect.

Speaker 1

1:20

yeah, really well done. Yeah, better than my wife did it the first year.

Speaker 2

1:27

I better cut that bit out of the recording. Okay, let's do this, right, all right, what's that one there?

Speaker 2

1:46

Okay okay, right, so here we go. Hello everybody. It's alex once again from remote work life. Welcome and thanks for joining me.

Speaker 2

2:01

And today I have, well, yet another special guest. As I mentioned to you before, we only bring the best guests on the remote work life podcast, and today I have with me Job van der Voort. And Job is the CEO and co-founder of remote Job, previously worked as a neuroscientist, believe it or not, before leaving academia to become the VP of product at GitLab, which, as you may or may not know, is the world's largest all-remote company. He hired talent in 67 different countries, so that, wow, that's immense. So we're going to learn a little bit about that today. Job is also a highly sought-after presenter. He speaks on topics relating to scaling a remote first startup, remote culture and the future of work. So, yeah, ideal guest have on the podcast. Job also has two kids and 500 hobbies, and and you know, I need to ask Job about that because 500 hobbies, I mean, puts me to shame. But, job, thank you for joining me today and you're welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 1

3:14

Thanks for having me, Alex.

Speaker 2

3:16

So welcome, so welcome, so Job, I've been waiting quite a while for this moment. I think you started remote around about 2019, around about the same time that I started the Remote Work Life podcast, and I suppose, quite frankly, it's exploded in terms of interest, in terms of uptake. I just wanted to say, as I I said, thank you for joining me, but tell me, um, how did it, you know, how did you get to this point? Did you envision yourself in this role when you're at gitlab, for example?

Lessons of Building a Distributed Company

Speaker 1

3:55

yeah, funny story. I um, I was doing a different job before gitlab where I met sid, the ceo, and he, oh, do you want to join me at GitLab? And I was like, yeah, I'll join you, but I kind of want to start my own company. So I'll join you for a year and then I'm going to leave. And that year turned into five years. So in a way I did envision running my own company, at least because that was explicitly my goal even by the time that I joined GitLab. And between Sid and I we always had an agreement that I would join and then I would leave, and that was always the agreement. And so I mean I stayed for five years and I told him look, now's the time I told you this was going to happen. Now I'm going to go. So in a way, yes, I mean I would never imagine myself leading such a large maybe you know, leading such a large um area. Maybe too early to tell, but relatively successful companies?

Speaker 2

4:49

no, and I think. Well, you obviously had, like you said, you had that goal in your mind. So it sounds like I mean, and from some of the interviews I've listened to you, you sound like maybe I don't know if I'm right or wrong a bit of a risk here, but you sound like you're the kind of person who really knows what they want and you go after it and you plan out what you want and you approach things from that perspective. Am I right in saying that?

Speaker 1

5:12

Yeah, no, you're right. I've been always very clear on what I want, although that thing has changed many times. I don't know what I want to do after remote if they kick me out. But no, kick me out, but um no. I've been always incredibly stubborn about what I want to do, and I've always just gone straight for that.

Speaker 2

5:29

So, yeah, yes, well, that's a good point, it's a good guess. It's a good guess, but no, um, and we're going to talk. I mean, for those of you listening today, we're going to really dig into um, obviously going to be talking about remote work, we're going to be talking about asynchronous work as well, working asynchronously within your teams. But, as you all know, I like to get under the skin really and really understand the people behind the businesses and to that, as I was saying before, I listened to a few of Yub's interviews and, yeah, what I was supposed to want to know is how was your time at GitLab? What did it teach?

Speaker 1

6:13

you A lot of things. It was five years, so it's a lot of time, and the company grew really fast. The first year, at GitLab, we were initially not even planning to raise any VC money and we thought we're just going to bootstrap this, and a year later we were in Y Combinator. We went through that whole experience and so a lot I learned, how I think the most fundamental thing is is that I learned that you can do this. You can build a truly distributed team.

Speaker 1

6:43

I have people all over the world and build a very successful company and, I think, in a lot of ways, a company that, for one, breaks the mold but also does many things significantly better, and not necessarily because of choice, but more because, as an emergent property of the fact that we didn't have any offices, we ended up hiring from all over the world and ended up with a very diverse team.

Speaker 1

7:03

I think that in and of itself, has so many advantages for any kind of organization and it's such a great forcing function to better practices like asynchronous work and many others that you know. I think that laid the foundation on what I was going to do next, right, like I think the reason that remote exists is because I saw the problem we face, the problems we face at GitLab and are trying to solve that at remote, but also because I believe that, okay, you can build these kinds of organizations and I want to help more people create organizations like this and, in doing so, give more people the opportunity to work for those kinds of organizations. So, yeah, a whole lot. Gitlab taught me a whole lot. I don't want to say everything, but a whole lot.

Speaker 2

7:43

No, nice summary. What's the biggest takeaway from you, from GitLab? What's the?

Speaker 1

7:51

biggest thing you've probably learned from your time there. I mean, it's what I said, it's the fact that you can do this, that you can build this truly distributed company, and that it has massive advantages. That is easily the best one, I think. When we were building GitLab, we often faced people being skeptic about the fact that we were fully remote and fully distributed. It was seen as a very controversial thing to do something that was very rare and exceptional, and the questions were always the same, like oh, only certain kind of people, or you don't collaborate, or it's just because you're building this kind of company, or a million others really. Like, for example, we knew at GitLab, oh, we were not a good acquisition target because we didn't have an office in San Francisco, so it would be very hard to acquire us. All of those things. They seem super controversial at the time, but while in GitLab, it seems so incredibly obvious that this was working. Yeah, that was the takeaway.

Speaker 2

8:45

That GitLab, it seemed so incredibly obvious that this was working. That was the takeaway. That's cool. You're at remote now. You started remote and everything seems to be going really well and you're hiring and growing different entities across the world. I mean, in terms of remote, how are things going at remote at the moment for you?

Speaker 1

9:07

uh, I think pretty well. Uh, it's running companies really really hard and um, remote grew from. I think a year ago we had 40 or 50 employees, today we have 500 something, so that's, that's a lot. It's really hard to build some kind of structure, organization and to make people even understand what their job is when you're growing this incredibly fast. And so the reason that we grew so fast is because there's so much demand, right, we have thousands of customers, and so those two things together that's really difficult. I think from the outside, and if you look at the numbers, we are quite a successful company. I think on the outside, if you look at the numbers, we are quite a successful company. I think on the inside sometimes it feels like everything is on fire, but it's also a little bit the way it goes to the startup. I think generally everybody that works at remote is working really hard to build something really, really good.

Speaker 2

9:59

I would give us an 8 out of 10 so far the thing I've noticed about you very um, are you the kind of person as well who just really absorbs challenges and just takes things as they come um, or are you somebody who just really foresees what might happen and can prepare for those things?

Speaker 1

10:23

well, I think a bit of both. Right. In a startup, the reality is, and for any problem set, most of the things that you think are complex you figure out in advance and real hard things you encounter while you're doing it right, and the same goes with a startup. So I had all these grand visions about particular parts of how we were going to do things and some of them really panned out and some of them were still very much building and I first saw them years ago. And others I had never imagined that those were complex things that we would trip over six times before we were able to fix them. So you know, I would say a bit of both, which I think is necessary in a startup.

Leadership Lessons in Remote Work

Speaker 2

11:09

You need to have a long-term vision, but you also need to be able to deal with the day-to-day. And what about? Because? I mean we in different podcasts I hear you talking a lot about, about remote, but what about you and your career? I mean you've talked through some of the chat, basically some of the challenges you've had so far with remote, but what about your career? I mean for you, what have been the personal challenges that you've had in your career that you've had to had to overcome?

Speaker 1

11:31

um, I don't know, I I always like to say that I'm not a very good example or story to listen to in that sense, because, as as we were saying early on, is that I like challenges and I overcome them by force of will. So I don't feel like I. You know, I think I've had struggles, like everybody else, but I I never felt like wow, that was like a major hard thing to come out to, to get over. You know, as I was saying, I think it's really hard to build a company and it's probably the biggest challenge so far career-wise.

Speaker 2

12:02

Fair enough and it's a nice challenge to have that success. You're in. Is it 67 entities? Now you said right.

Speaker 1

12:11

No, but we are around 60 or so that we have right now and it's growing really fast. I think we'll be around 80 before the end of the year. So we're adding a lot these last two months.

Speaker 2

12:22

And for those who don't know about remote reading a lot these last two months of steve and for those who don't know about remote, just could you give us just like an overview of of what remote is all about? I mean, I know, but I don't want to bore people with my, so you please, you tell us?

Speaker 1

12:33

it's very simple if you have a company and you want to hire someone in a different country than where you have that company, we can solve that for you. We take care of payroll, we take care of compliance, taxes and anything else that comes with it. That is what remote does and that's what we solve, and we solve that in a million different ways. We solve that for contractors, for direct employees or employees that are employed through us, through an employer records kind of structure, any kind of form really, and anything that comes with that as well Payroll benefits, but also more complicated things than that. We solve all of that, which is a lot and it's really really complex, but fundamentally it just solves that one problem you want to hire someone in a different country. We solve that.

Speaker 2

13:15

And you do that by API. How does that work then? Because I mean, I get the concept, but you do that via API. Can you explain that a bit more?

Speaker 1

13:26

No.

Speaker 1

13:27

So the way we do it is by lots of sweat and tears. It's you have to figure out like, let's say, I want to hire Jane in Portugal, right, I have to then go into Portugal, figure out what are the local labor laws like, how do I employ someone, how do I run payroll locally? So we do this for every country in the world and in doing so, we have to build software to automate the processes involved with onboarding Jane and all their other friends. So we build all this software, which is this really complicated stack of software that does a million different things, and we make it available directly to our customers so that you can just sign up and you don't have to talk to someone, but rather you're just guided through this onboarding thing. Or we make available APIs so that, if you are a partner of ours, you can offer the same kind of functionality. So you can say, well, you can employ people through us, but really through remote, and there's this API available that we then use to integrate with remote that is really what that is Amazing.

Speaker 2

14:24

Like you said, it's got so many different moving parts, but you've managed to package it in such a way that you've been able to scale so quickly. You must have a wonderful team.

Speaker 1

14:36

I do yeah.

Speaker 2

14:38

And in terms of the uh, did you, did you and I mean I know obviously everybody's been forced to work remotely, um, and some are liking it, some others aren't, and it's you know you're you're having lots of clients on board did you? Did you anticipate the sort of uh, the success that you, that you're having now? Did you anticipate the numbers?

Speaker 1

15:03

No, I didn't. I also didn't anticipate COVID, so, which I think is a major boon and like one of the main ways that this massive shift to remote work happened right. So, no, I didn't anticipate it. We started seeing it when COVID started happening. It was very clear that this was going to be an accelerating trend, right. So when COVID happened, it was very clear that this was going to be an accelerating trend.

Speaker 1

15:21

So when COVID happened, it's not that there was immediately a boom of demand, the demand was already there and we were already serving part of that, but I mean, we weren't actually, because we only opened the doors after COVID, but nonetheless, we were anticipating the demand. We were speaking with potential customers for a long time, but what we did anticipate is that once people start working remotely, they start to realize that, oh, I can just hire internationally instead of just hiring in my country or even in a neighborhood in which I have an office. And now I think we're starting to see that demand realized. Right Now you start to see more and more jobs opening that have location anywhere, and that is what we were anticipating a year, year and a half ago, but not before that, absolutely not. No, I thought we would be successful. I knew that this was an interesting market. I knew we could be successful in this. I didn't anticipate us, within two years, to have a company with 500 employees now.

Speaker 2

16:21

It's incredible. It's just, it's beyond, sort of like, yeah, it's incredible, that's the only word I can think of right now and obviously being, you know, fast forwarding to where you are now, to 500 employees, leadership obviously comes into it. You know you, you as not just a founder, but there has to be so many facets to your, the way you work and who you are, in order to to have a successful company. Um, with that scale, what's the? What would you say is probably the most significant or most important leadership lesson that you've learned.

Speaker 1

17:03

Oh, good question, I don't know. I think it's hire great people and give them the space to be great. I think that's one of the most important things. You'll find that if you hire someone that's ambitious and hungry, as they say, right, wants to get shit done, and you give them the space to do so, they tend to be excellent people and they tend to do really well, and I think that's how I am as a leader. I tell all my reports that you have to play around to yourself. You get to do your best work. I will make sure you're unblocked. You have anything.

Speaker 2

17:36

You need money, people, whatever else show, show me your best work, and that tends to work out really, really well okay, the reason I'm laughing is because I've worked in recruitment for a number of years myself and you said just hire the best people. Yeah, that, yeah, that's the the end game. You want to hire the best people. Yeah, that's the end game. You want to hire the best people. But I think the principles of recruiting and hiring people, yeah, they're pretty much there. We're not set in stone but it's pretty straightforward to follow those principles but it's easier to sort of like the practice of recruiting and hiring the right people is the challenge what's the remote way or the job way of hiring people and, you know, making sure that they're aligned with what you're looking at.

Speaker 1

18:29

Yeah, I think it starts a little bit early in the net. I think you have to create a company culture or a place where talented people want to work. Right. To create a really safe, inclusive environment is a really important one. I think it's important to almost everybody. That, I think, is great. So that's a pretty good start, right. And even if you want to hire a white guy from San Francisco, creating an inclusive environment is also going to do better for them, right. That's a really good place to start. And then you create an atmosphere that is pleasant for them as well.

Speaker 1

18:56

If you're a micromanager, they will get that sense from you, from your organization, in talking with your organization. Like nobody wants to work for a micromanager. So that's where it starts. And then you know, like there's no such thing as the best person in any given thing. One way you're definitely not going to find it is by looking at someone's CV and counting the years of experience they have in X or Y, right. Like it's not how you find someone great at all. It's quite the opposite. I think you're going to find someone that's incredibly rigid and very like expecting a particular thing if they spend a lot of time. So I think really what you're looking for is like what is the kind of person that matches our organization, matches what I like to the type of person that I like to work with, right, and this is often described as cultural, but it's also, you know how people select people that look like themselves, so careful not to use that but, how you know, looking for that person that matches well with you and with with a greater organization. And then, of course, has some relevant experience.

Speaker 1

19:54

And what I find is that one of the best predictors if someone is successful at remote not going to make any judgments with other companies, but at remote is someone that is very kind, hardworking and just very smart. And then experience in the relevant place in which we're hiring them into. It's definitely important and it's going to help them a lot, but it's not the solution to the hiring fit right. The fit is going to be fully determined by all the other things, assuming they have the experience that they need to be able to do the job, and that's how you hire the best people.

Speaker 1

20:28

And so that means sometimes, you know, we have people that don't have many years of experience in a particular function, but because now they finally have, you know they're getting the trust, they're getting the space to do the best work. That is why they succeed at remote and so, yeah, I think a very large part, if not my entire team is exactly people like that. I mean, I've never been a CEO so far. It's going pretty well. So that's what I was thinking about. It's like I'm also new to this job, so let's all figure it out together. I don't necessarily have to hire people that can redo the thing that they have been doing in the past.

Speaker 2

21:06

Love that principle, love that way of looking at recruitment, and I think I've interviewed many people who work remotely, especially those who hire and make the decisions, and I think it's very different. The way that remote companies hire, the tactics might be similar to sort of office-based hiring, but the thought process is completely it's, far removed. It's so much more, like you said, it's more about the person. The CV is not. People are still so hung up on resumes and CVs and don't look beyond the CV, and I think that's something that I can categorically say that remote businesses do better than any other. So, yeah, I love that.

Speaker 2

21:57

Okay, so one one of the biggest challenges. Actually, I come across your um and in fact, myself, when I was uh, well, I worked remotely myself and there was a point where I became very, um, isolated in my career, um, and perhaps got so focused on work that I didn't, I didn't reach out as much as I should do. I just just got my head down and did my work and that was it. Then I realized you know, I've got to do a bit more, I've got to be a bit more sort of out there, I've got to speak to people and I've got to continue. I like to continue to learn that my inquisitive nature is what really sort of took me to to that place where I was learning a bit more. But what's your approach to not just yourself, continue your own development, um, but also for your team as well, what's your approach to you know, learning and development to keep moving forward?

Speaker 1

22:57

um, yeah, I mean it. I think it really depends on, like, what part of the organization, what kind of person you're talking about, right? Like, I think it's very different, for the people that report up to me directly are all executives who have a very different kind of you know, path than you know an individual contributor in the organization, I think you know, as an organization as a whole. There's a few things you want to do. One is you want to make sure that for any given role, there's a career path available to them, right, whatever that might be and it might be, you know, moving up in organizations, or becoming a manager, or a manager of managers, or moving, you know, horizontally to a different function, or just at like a different seniority right, and all horizontally to a different function, or just at like a different seniority right, and all of those have to be available to anybody in the organization. If there isn't, they're going to leave eventually because they want to make steps up in their career and like and they, they also want that recognition like I am growing and I'm getting better, so I want to actually move up in roles. So that's one which is like setting the framework, um, and then you want to make sure that everybody has a manager that understands that part of their role is to help their reports grow and grow in their function and grow in their capabilities and how good they are, and that you know and wants them to succeed and can help them in succeeding.

Speaker 1

24:15

And like, again, this is an organizational structure trick, but like if the people have too many reports they can't do that right, which is more acceptable but nonetheless unacceptable. More acceptable, hiring the organization, but definitely if you are an individual contributor, your manager should have time for you, they should have time for you. And then, beyond that, as an organization, you want to provide opportunities to learn and to develop yourself, and it can be in all sorts of ways right, both internally as well as externally, through making available budgets, through coaching them to become leaders, for example, by offering courses and whatever else, and internal things. With that, we have a learning and development team side of remote, so growing, you know, companies also. But yeah, I think it's a combination of all of those things. I think that is that is what is most important that there's many different ways that you do this, that you support people's growth within an organization and sometimes outside of that I like that and talking talking about the team, obviously continued learning is an important thing.

Speaker 2

25:25

I'm sure you hire people who probably work remotely. Do you hire generally people who have not worked remotely, who have not worked asynchronously before as well?

Adopting Async Work

Speaker 1

25:35

Yeah, we don't care about that, we just hire whoever we want to hire. I mean, if you can communicate well, you can work remotely, that's it. I don't feel about that. We just hire whoever we want to hire. I mean, if you can communicate well, you can work remotely, that's it. I don't feel really strongly about it. Yeah, otherwise, one, you're just going to shoot yourself in the foot. And two, why? Why block the opportunity to otherwise great people? Like it's not, like they have an office to go to, so there was no choice. Yeah, and it's not to say that like people won't struggle. They might struggle, but we provide sufficient resources and coaching. And again, like we have a good structure in the organization to make sure that you can succeed, um, and there are resources for you to see it. And it still doesn't work out, for whatever reason.

Speaker 2

26:10

That's unfortunate, but also, luckily, very rare and one of those things that maybe people have to adapt to and I think more and more in the future is working asynchronously. And for you, why? Because I mean, this is something I think obviously is going to, it's going to grow. It's people talking about it a lot more now, obviously, than they used to talk about it. Um, people like yourself you're the I guess I've seen as go-to people now in terms of talking about it and advising on it. But in your view, why should, why should leaders care about adopting async work practices?

Speaker 1

26:54

well, if they don't, their businesses will fail. So I think that's a pretty good reason why they should care about it. But the reality is is very simple if you, if you don't pay attention to this, if you don't start working asynchronously, if you are a remote company, or even if you're not, um, you're going to be in meetings all day. That's it, right like it's. I think asynchronous work is it's, or like working asynchronously is presented as a magical thing that's going to solve all your problems. But the reality is, it's just you know a few good standards around how you should communicate that help you also avoid meetings and help you avoid overhead completely unnecessary, which is sort of implied in overhead overhead that you know everybody would be happy to go without. And so, yeah, you have no choice as a business leader. Unless everybody wants to be in meetings all day, which no one wants to be, you have to start working asynchronously.

Speaker 1

27:51

Wait, I don't know if I answered your question I did say what I wanted to say well, it does, it does.

Speaker 2

27:58

And the thing is that I think lots of people I mean I'm looking at my peer group now and people who perhaps are not used to working remotely it's almost there's still a block, I guess a mindset block, I think, in the sense that people still feel as though, if they are in a meeting, that they're doing things, they're getting things done, and therefore they add more and more meetings to the diary, which I just find just something that I can't get over. It seems as though that people are not necessarily thinking about, or even I don't know, thinking, that asynchronous work can be easily adopted. Is it something that can be easily adapted? I know you said that each team and each business has to have its own way and its own way of working. Each team and each business has to have its own way and its own way of working, but how it is Actually, that's a difficult question to answer. Instead of that, I'll ask you how should leaders approach trying to address an over-dependence on meetings?

Speaker 1

29:13

Stop having meetings. That's the trick. Stop having meetings, just try to write things to each other. That's it. There's nothing more to it. That's the whole secret. It's just stop having those meetings. Just consider for a moment do we need to have this meeting? Is this valuable to have? And there's a few very simple rules you can follow. One are you just sharing information? Don't have the meeting. No point to have a meeting at all, just massive overhead and delaying particular kind of information.

Speaker 1

29:39

Rule number two if you have a meeting, make sure it has a clear agenda. Everybody has seen it in advance and everybody contributes to it. And then you can just add on top of that a million different things just for meetings by itself. But like the if you, if you say, well, we want to stop over relying on on meetings, I stop having those meetings and like find other ways. You will like. You will literally be forced to find other ways. You will literally be forced to find other ways to communicate with each other.

Speaker 1

30:00

And if you're remote, and especially if you're distributed so you're not all working at the same time, then that other ways means you have to write stuff down somewhere or record it right, like speak it into the air or into a Loom video or whatever else, and the moment you do that, you're working asynchronously. Right, it's like there's a trap you can fall into, which is to say, well, we're going to stop having meetings, but now we're just all chatting on Slack all the time and everybody's expected to be online at the same time, because we are really bad at sharing information, and I think that's actually likely that you're going to fall into the trap if you're just immediately going to stop having meetings. But if you think about for a few minutes, what if we write things down in a place where they belong, in appropriate context, and make it so that they are non-ephemeral, right, slack being ephemeral, the messages disappear essentially once they're out of sight, and then we put things in a notion page or in our project management tool or whatever else. Um, yeah, you're gonna, you're working asynchronously, that's it. That's the solution.

Speaker 1

30:57

Nobody wants to be in meetings all day and, like, the few times that you are in meetings, you should spend that time, you know, enjoying seeing each other and having an interesting conversation, like we are. But, um, yeah, so yeah, how to address it? Stop having those meetings and then figure out other ways, create a single source of truth for all information and write stuff down there I know you said write things down lots of of other.

Speaker 2

31:19

Well, I say lots, but people are adopting things like you know video, short form videos and short form even audios. Now that's pretty big. Do you do that as well, or are you mainly written form within remote?

Speaker 1

31:37

No, you know different media for different purposes and the nice thing about text is it's easy to search through and easy to structure, whereas you cannot easily structure video or audio. And luckily Loom and like Yak and such, they now have transcripts which are okay not great, but they're okay and some of them you can search. So that helps. But you need to have some sort of central place where you report your documentation, your information, and that central place can be different for different projects. You might want to have one for the whole company, for example, but then for different projects it could be a particular project management tool or whatever else. But writing things down is nice because it makes things easy to find no, yeah, agreed into.

Speaker 2

32:26

I mean, I think we've covered async, obviously just in a overview, but and a lot of really like your simplistic not simplistic, but your that's the word straightforward view on that and I think maybe, I guess maybe people are just overcomplicating things.

Speaker 1

32:48

Maybe I'm oversimplifying things. I think it's a bit of both.

Speaker 2

32:52

You think. Well, I do think that, like you said, if there's no point having, if people are just sort of creating meetings just for the sake of creating a meeting, then then why is it there in the first place? But no, it's good to hear that, but what I wanted to ask next is really what's what's in store for for remote going forward? What's the? What does the future look like? Um, and also from your perspective you've you, obviously, you're a father. You recently had a second edition to your family what, what's the what's in store for you personally as well?

Speaker 1

33:31

well, no more kids, alex. That's we're done with the kids. Two kids is is a lot, very happy with them, but no more. No, look, remote's doing really well as a company. We, you know we do a few things, but our ambitions are far greater than that. So a lot of exciting things to come out most of next year as the year is ending now. Yeah, for me personally, it's doing that and just enjoying my family. We're really ambitious with what we're doing with Romance. It doesn't nearly feel like we have arrived to where we want to be. We have a really long path to go, so there's a lot to do.

Speaker 2

34:15

Well, as a fellow dad myself, I've got three kids.

Speaker 2

34:15

There's a lot to do. Well, as a fellow dad myself, I've got three kids. You're dealing with different time zones, different. You know you're in Portugal, right, and then you've got people in the US who you've got people, well, all over the world, how? I mean, a big part of my audience are people who are parents, who are probably working from home sometimes. What would be your biggest piece of advice? Obviously, you've got to be organized. I think everybody would say that. But what is your biggest piece of advice for people who are trying to find a balance with work and home life?

Speaker 1

35:02

And what would you say? I would say prioritize what is important, which is your family. Your kids won't give a shit about what you did in your life, um, in, in terms of work, whether you were successful or not, whether you were the best or not. So, uh, prioritize your family. That's a regret you'll never have. That's it.

Balancing Work and Family Time

Speaker 1

35:19

I actually live in the Netherlands right now. One of the reasons we moved is to be close to my parents, and that's one of the best things I've ever done, so my kids can enjoy their grandparents and it's really, really nice. And so I prioritize that they didn't move. If it was for remote, maybe I would have moved to the US, where many of our customers are. That's not the choice I wanted to make. I would be a terrible leader if I was very unhappy, and I would be unhappy if I couldn't spend time with my kids and if we couldn't prioritize them, and so that's it. And how do you prioritize when you have a lot of work going on and you can work 24-7? It's by aggressively prioritizing Block time for your family so that your work doesn't interfere. Put away your phone or make sure that you know your phone is um, uh, you don't have your work, work applications on your phone, for example, so that there's no, there's no work calling you while you're with your family. I think think that is an easy trick, but an important one.

Speaker 2

36:22

It's been great finally to have you on the podcast, and I, for one, will be keeping an eye on what Remote is doing for the future. And, yeah, you're welcome to join us again any time. And you said you've got some things in store for 2022, which we'd love to hear from you again in 2022, just to hear what those updates are. But for now, jörg, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

Speaker 1

36:49

Thanks, Alex.