20VC: Why Founders Must Use VCs as a Barometer, How to Make Distributed Teams Work Successfully & The Biggest Mistake People Make Early In Their Career with Dylan Serota, Founder @ Terminal

Dylan Serota is the Founder & Chief Strategy Officer @ Terminal, the startup that helps you create world-class technical teams through remote operations as a service. They recently raised a phenomenal $13m Series A with some of the world's most renowned names including Lightspeed, KPCB, Craft, Thiel, Atomic and Jerry Yang just to name a few. As for Dylan, he is also a Founder-in-Residence @ Atomic, one of the valley's most exciting new institutions which both founds and funds companies and includes the likes of Hims, TalkIQ (acq by Dialpad) and more. Prior to Atomic and Terminal, Dylan was Head of Platform @ Eventbrite where he led platform product org, built third-party developer ecosystem and platform partnerships. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Dylan made his way into the world of startups with Eventbrite and how that led to his realisation on the future of development operations with Terminal? 2.) Why does Dylan believe that it is important for startups to build distributed teams earlier in their growth curve than often suggested? What are the key aspects to making remote teams work well? Why does Dylan believe that "companies overvalue their culture"? How does Dylan assess culture across remote teams? 3.) Jason lemkin says "startups can either hire a stretch VP or a burnt out mediocre VP", does Dylan agree with this? How does Dylan assess the balance between hiring functional specialists vs jack of all trades? When is the right time to make the transition from generalist to specialist? 4.) Hw does Dylan analyze and assess a startup leaderships team ability to adapt and prioritize speed? What is key to successful decision-making today in startups? How does Dylan think about the importance of speed when it comes to product ideation and iteration? 5.) What does Dylan believe is the biggest mistake many people make early in their career? What are the commonalities of the truly successful people in how they have structured their careers? How does Dylan think about the balance between title vs salary vs experience? What should one optimise for and when? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Dylan’s Fave Book: The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Dylan on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Are you told your standards are too high, well The League is the app that tells you to keep them that way, they know your time is valuable so simply tell them your preferences and they will handle the scouting and vetting for you. Plus even better, your profile will only ever be seen by people who match your preferences, matches expire after 21 days and so there are no drawn-out games and they even require LinkedIn to protect your privacy and block you from matching with co-workers and business connections. You can apply now by downloading The League on the app store or heading to The League.com Zoom is the fastest-growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an a variety of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. And you can see for yourself! Sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us. Culture Amp is the platform that makes it easy to collect, understand and act on employee feedback. From onboarding surveys to company-wide engagement, individual effectiveness and more, the platform manages multiple sources of feedback and connects the dots for you and that is why companies like Slack, Nike, Oracle and Lyft all trust Culture Amp. It enables leaders to make better decisions, demonstrate impact and turn your company culture into a competitive edge. Find out more on cultureamp.com.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  You are listening to the 20 Minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and I'm so excited for our episode today. So the show has given me so much in my life, but the thing that you don't maybe see is the friendships that one builds through the show. And that's the case today with our guest and the organisation he co-founded. Before we deep dive on his intro, I'm not sure I've ever come across such a consistent group of both incredibly talented, but also genuine and great actors in the ecosystem as the team at Atomic. They've done so much for me and I really am so grateful to them. However, enough of the soppy stuff and to the intro, and I'm thrilled to welcome Dylan Serota, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Terminal, the startup that helps you create world-class technical teams through remote operations as a service. And they recently raised a phenomenal $13 million Series A with some of the world's most renowned names,

• 0:43Harry Stebbings?

  including Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, Craft, Teal, Atomic and Jerry Yang, just to name a few. As for Dylan, he's also a founder at Atomic, one of the valley's most exciting new institutions, which both founds and funds companies and includes the likes of Rocketship Hims, Talk IQ acquired by DialPad and more in their immense portfolio. And prior to Atomic and Terminal, Dylan was head of platform at Eventbrite, where he led platform product org, built third-party developer ecosystems and platform partnerships. And I'd also want to say a huge thank you to both Andrew Dunham at Hims for the intro to Dylan's day and to Kevin Harts at Eventbrite for the fantastic questions. I really cannot thank you enough for that. But before we meet today's guest, are you told your standards are too high? Well, the League is the app that tells you to keep them that way.

• 1:27Harry Stebbings?

  They know your time is valuable, so simply tell them your preferences and they will handle the scouting and vetting for you. Plus, even better, your profile will only be seen by people who match your preferences. Matches expire after 21 days, and so there are no drawn-out games. And they even require LinkedIn to protect your privacy and block you from matching with coworkers and business connections. I have to say, I am a big fan and you can apply now by downloading the League on the Amp Store or heading to theleague.com. And speaking of products that I'm a fan of, you must check out Zoom, the fastest-growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in a variety of activities, including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms and persistent chat all in one place.

• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

  Platform plus it's the easiest solution to manage, scale and use and has the most straightforward affordable pricing. But you don't have to take my word for it. Zoom is the top rated conferencing app across various user review sites, including G2 Crowd and Trust Radius. And you can see for yourself, sign up for a free account, not a trial, just visit zoom.us. And speaking of connecting people there, you must check out Culture Amp, the platform that makes it easy to collect, understand and act on employee feedback. From onboarding surveys to company-wide engagement, individual effectiveness and more. The platform manages multiple sources of feedback and connects the dots for you. And that's why companies like Slack, Nike, Oracle and Lyft all trust Culture Amp. And it enables leaders to make better decisions, demonstrate impact and turn your company culture into a competitive edge.

• 2:55Harry Stebbings?

  So put your people and culture first and find out more now on cultureamp.com. But that's enough from me. So I'm now very, very excited to welcome Dylan Serota, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Terminal.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:14Harry Stebbings?

  Dylan, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show today. A huge thanks to the wonderful Andrew Duddham at Hims for the intro, but thank you so much for joining me today, Dylan.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  Well, pleasure to be here. Huge fan of the show and excited to be chatting with you.

• 3:26Harry Stebbings?

  Well, I promise I'll pay you in Bitcoin later for that, but I do want to start today with your story. And how did you come to co-found what I believe will be a leader in distributed engineering teams with Terminal? What was that aha moment?

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Sure thing. And there were a lot of people involved and timing was so important to make this happen. So quick background on me leading up to Terminal. In 2009, I was in college at the University of Pennsylvania and actually trying to get my own startup off the ground when I was introduced to Kevin Hartz through a close friend and mentor of mine. And after a brief conversation with him, I got really excited about what he was doing with Eventbrite and the opportunity to work with Kevin. So I abandoned my idea at the time and committed to joining Eventbrite after graduation. And I joined when there was about 30 people and ended up staying for seven years while the company grew to hundreds and hundreds of employees. And during my last few years, I worked in product where I led the platform team. As we scaled the company, there was this

• 4:20Speaker 02

  demand for great engineering talent. So we took on a remote development strategy and ended up acquiring and then building it upon a team based in Mendoza, Argentina. And this is where I saw firsthand the power of having access to talent in a market far outside the valley like Mendoza, which just has incredible engineers. And we were able to scale that team to around a hundred super fast. And I saw this as a critical competitive advantage for Eventbrite. And so I wondered why more companies weren't thinking outside the valley to scale their teams. Meanwhile, all the big players were already doing this, like Facebook, Microsoft, Google. But earlier stage companies weren't taking the strategy. And the fact is scaling global teams the traditional way is really hard operationally.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  It's risky, it's slow, it's expensive, and it creates massive distractions across almost every function. Because you essentially need to replicate all those functions in the new market. So my aha moment was when I realized that there's actually an incredible opportunity to create a company that could simplify this process by thinking about providing a platform that could take on a lot of the large upfront costs of real estate and other services and complexities involved and create basically an AWS for remote operations. And as I said, timing was really lucky here because I've known the atomic team for a while and they had already been building a model like this for their own companies for a couple of years.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  And this started out just as an internal service that they had created out of the pure need to find better, faster ways to scale their team. We also knew Joe Lonsdale, who had strong convictions about the future of global talent and building distributed tech teams. So together with my other co-founder, it just became this awesome team that organically formed to take on this mission to try to redefine and globalize the future of work. That's really how it all came together. And while it's only been a year since we launched the company, this has actually been many years in the making.

• 6:13Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, what a year it's been first. And I'm so pleased you said about Kevin Hart, sir. He mentioned a certain backflipping skill of yours, which we'll get into later, Dylan. Have no fear. I do want to discuss one thing that you said to me before with regards to kind of earlier careers. It's that many get their more formative years wrong in terms of. Prioritization. Can I ask Dylan, what did you mean by this?

• 6:33Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I think one of the biggest mistakes people make early in their career is leaving a company too soon. So I think early in your career, you should try to find a company and work there for at least four years. Average tenure in the valley is about eighteen months and that's just such little time to actually learn what it takes to build a business. If I look at the best people I've worked with and many successful peers of mine and many founders I know, all of them have had at least one extended tour of duty with a company long enough to where you see the ups and downs. You see culture evolve, you see really hard problems solved that often take years. And so I kind of see this as really the modern MBA. And it follows advice that I received from a mentor of mine, Dave Potruch, who is the CEO of Charles Schwab for a number of years.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  And he told me after graduating that you've got to maximize experience over title and salary until your early thirties. And basically get an amazing foundation of experience to maximize what will ultimately be your highest grossing years. So if you want to be a VP of Marketing or Sales, you can stay linear and take the next pay and title when it's offered. But you might max out or cap out your value in that one discipline. But if you want to build a company or be a CEO, COO, I think you should focus on getting experience in different disciplines like sales, marketing, finance. And the best way of doing that is, I think, to stay at a company and make that your career development platform and find people within that company, once you've proven yourself,

• 7:58Speaker 02

  to give you the chance to experience all the different functions that go into creating a real enduring business.

• 8:04Harry Stebbings?

  No, absolutely. I mean, I do have one subsequent question I'm too intrigued not to ask. And it's, we had Jeremy Liu from Lightspeed on the show, Lightspeed being one of your investors, actually, I didn't think of that. But he said to me that in his early years, he kind of rode in the coattails of great people and followed them. Maybe in a way like you might have done with Kevin Hart and kind of being inspired by him. And he kind of mentioned that inflection point of when the right time is to not ride in the coattails anymore and really pursue your own thing. I'm intrigued, how did you think about that and kind of the mental framework you approached when leaving Eventbrite and the safety of maybe Kevin Hart and kind of the security you felt with him to pursue your passion with Terminal?

• 8:40Speaker 02

  It's a great question and believe me, it was a tough choice to leave Eventbrite after so many years and learning so many different parts of the business from sales to strategy to product. But to be honest, I went to Kevin when I was interested in leaving and we had a very frank and honest conversation about what the opportunity would be like and both him and Julia were incredibly supportive and so I felt like I had their vote of confidence. It was absolutely the right time to make a change.

• 9:07Harry Stebbings?

  I did also speak to many of your ambassadors before the show and a commonality was your thesis around building these geographically diversified teams at such an early stage. So building remote teams early slightly contradicts maybe the conventional wisdom of kind of scaling geographically. So why do you think that companies should geographically diversify maybe earlier in their growth?

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Great question. So I think simply building a company in one market like Silicon Valley is harder than ever before to sustain. In fact, I think it's unsustainable for 99% of the companies out there. Talent is obviously the most precious resource for a technology company and being isolated in one market actually poses massive long-term risk to a company's ability to compete, especially with high attrition rates of employees or the risk of a new overnight unicorn that can take up significant portion of the talent from the ecosystem. So we believe geographically diversifying or building teams across multiple markets is a muscle memory that you should start building

• 10:05Speaker 02

  much earlier than conventional wisdom would suggest and we're seeing companies now do that on day one or with employee number one. And I think that trend will only continue to be the norm. And we've spoken to companies that wait to do this much later when they have 50, 80, 100 engineers. And that's much more difficult to actually re-engineer your practices and divisions of responsibility. Or you now have a dated tech stack that makes it increasingly hard to find engineers that are actually excited to build upon the technologies you're using that may just be a few years behind the modern trend.

• 10:39Harry Stebbings?

  No, absolutely. It seems so much easier to insert that kind of culture and discipline from day one. I promise this isn't a light speed advert though, but I did speak to Nakul before the show and he said then with that in mind. And the benefits you just posited, what are the key aspects to making remote teams successful?

• 10:54Speaker 02

  So there's many aspects here. I think first market selection is key. So understanding where you want to take your team and the right place for that team to grow. And there's a lot of factors that go into that. In terms of talent, how big is the talent pool? Who are the incumbents in the market with large engineering teams? What technologies are popular in that city or that region? What universities are local there that could feed into the long-term potential talent pool? How aligned are time zones? How easy is travel? So there's a lot from overall market selection, but from a team standpoint, there's no question that you need strong initial leadership for that team to be successful. So hiring the first senior tech lead is critical. It doesn't have to be the first hire, but I think it does need to be in the first few

• 11:38Speaker 02

  to establish a strong foundation for that team and allow that lead to start making some of the hiring decisions with local knowledge of talent on the ground. And lastly, and I think a very important factor is making that team feel like first-class citizens. And this really stems from giving complete product ownership to that team and not just thinking that they'll fix bugs or work on lower priority items. And doing that early on gives that team, I think, a vote of confidence from headquarters that they're equal contributors, which is very important in establishing trust across the offices.

• 12:09Harry Stebbings?

  Before we discuss kind of the conventional problems that are often associated, one for me that I always get concerned by is just seamless lines of communication. What have been your learnings on ensuring kind of seamless communication flows between distributed teams?

• 12:22Speaker 02

  So one of the, I think, most important factors is time zone alignment. I think what we've heard from feedback is the more hours that you have to synchronously communicate, whether that's over Slack or other tools and systems, that's one of the most important factors. And then obviously, I think that we're at this stage in time where a lot of those technologies are just being adopted, whether it's in your core office in San Francisco or when you're making a concerted effort to establish new channels and new pathways. The other thing I think most companies need to change is just over-documenting or increasing the documentation that they have of decisions that are being made at. Various meetings and points and having a repository where someone could look back and see the timeline of those decisions. Those are really helpful.

• 13:06Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, no, I love that transparency, but the the common pushback I also get is the detrimental impact on culture for having distributed teams. But when we chatted before, and I love this quote, you said companies overvalue their culture. What makes you say this and and how do you think about culture across remote teams?

• 13:22Speaker 02

  Yes, and to clarify what I mean by that, it's that companies overvalue the culture they have today and undervalue the culture they can evolve into and create in the future. So this was a big lesson for me from Julia Hartz at Eventbrite, that culture should not be stagnant or overly preserved. It should evolve with the team that you build, a real bottoms up approach. And as that relates to building remote teams, I think companies need to understand that as much as they want to just export their culture to new markets, they really should be equally importing culture from that market into headquarters. I'm not sure who said it or coined the phrase, but I really like it. It's that culture is a verb, not a noun. And I think that's very much the spirit of what I believe in

• 14:04Speaker 02

  and what can ultimately build longer term strength for a company with respect to culture.

• 14:09Harry Stebbings?

  So if culture isn't the prohibitor, then Dylan, I'm getting rather confused. What are the commonalities and challenges that really keep you up at night when you think about establishing a remote office for an early stage company? Are there commonalities?

• 14:20Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I think the main challenge that we see that is common across the board is when companies decide way too late that they need to find a new market to build their team. So they're at their wits end and basically throw this problem on the shoulders of engineering leadership to figure out. And while many CTOs and VCs of engineering have faced this problem in previous roles, the talent ecosystems around the world have changed so much, even over the last few years, that it's a whole new ballgame. And it forces that person who should be directing the technology vision for the product to focus on things like traveling back and forth to scope new markets and figuring out office space and negotiating internally with legal and HR to get the operations figured out.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  And so when you end up putting that into the engineering leadership and to juggle all of those different balls, that's definitely, I think, the biggest. Challenge and the commonality that we see when companies are deciding to establish a remote team.

• 15:15Harry Stebbings?

  And another core challenge that we did discuss before as well is actually kind of very interesting, as you said, from more a meta perspective is that distributed teams is more of a philosophical hurdle than a practical hurdle. I'm intrigued, what does that really mean and how do you often see this embodied?

• 15:30Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So philosophically, we hear that companies know they will need a remote team at some point, but think that they're just not quite ready or not quite set up to make it successful. Yet we're at this exciting time, as I said, where all of these technologies are now available, enabling remote teams to, I think, be more successful today than obviously ever before. And so I think a lot of these companies have actually adopted these technologies and practices without even realizing it. To get over that mental hurdle, if you will, one way is actually to, I think, ask a small team of your engineers to work from home for a few days or a week and document what was challenging and then grade their relative productivity.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  And I've actually seen variations of this done a few times and often those teams realize they're actually already doing what they need to support remote. They're communicating and documenting in Slack and Jira, using video conferencing effectively. They're able to access all the resources they need in the cloud. So I think taking a step back and really evaluating actually what you need from a team, from a process and a tools perspective can get you over the mental hurdle because it's most likely all there in front of you.

• 16:36Harry Stebbings?

  I was actually just chatting with a friend about this show, the friend being a VC, and he said, Albert, Harry, the trouble with distributed teams is it makes acquisitions much harder for the acquirer and they're generally put off by them. Would you agree with that or is that a bit of a distributed teams myth?

• 16:49Speaker 02

  Absolutely not. We've actually recently gone through this with a partner of ours, Talk IQ, that was recently acquired by DialPad. And part of the reason that they were a very desirable acquisition target was purely because that they had that team in place in Waterloo that had already been established, the operations were set up. And so I actually think that more companies will look at teams that have a distributed model as a competitive advantage and actually. Really increase the value potential for that wire.

• 17:22Harry Stebbings?

  God, I really need to get some more intellectual friends, clearly. But I do want to move kind of one layer deeper now to the operations themselves. So if we start with something that Jason Lankin always says to me, being for an early stage startup, you'll never be able to afford the expert from the incumbent. So you have to hire the stretch or the burnt out VP. First, would you agree with this? And second, how do you think about that balance of kind of hiring for experts versus jacks of all trades in early stage?

• 17:48Speaker 02

  So I'm a firm believer in hiring for the problem set that you're facing now and not getting caught up too much in the long term, thinking about how this person will work out when the company is double or triple the size. And that's exactly why I think early stage you want to hire more jacks of all trades and less experts from incumbents. So as a company, you don't want to be a jack of all trades, master of none. But with early stage employees, I actually think that those who are less expert but exhibit more interdisciplinary skills can show a higher upper cap on their learning and adaptability. And those are the people that I think can be most successful and actually scale their learning in line with the growth of the company.

• 18:27Harry Stebbings?

  I'm so interested, you said about kind of scale in line with the growth of the company. I hear a lot of people say that some people are just destined for one stage, Harry. Do you agree with that thinking? Or do you think there is that kind of personal plasticity to move with the company?

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Absolutely, there's the plasticity to move within the company. Everyone doesn't scale at the same linear rate, but I think it's important for leadership to find the people who have that aptitude and continue to give them opportunity and resources to learn and grow. And I think that many people can do that successfully. And I think companies that are able to retain and find those people that can scale with the company are often more successful.

• 19:01Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, we mentioned also kind of the element of experts there from incumbents and the benefits maybe of jacks of all trades at the earlier stages. Obviously, the experts come with much slower processes and decision making being from the incumbents. How do you think about maybe then a startup leadership team's ability to really adapt and prioritize speed?

• 19:19Speaker 02

  I love this question. And I'm really lucky that one of my co-founders, Luke, is an ex Navy SEAL team leader who's really influenced our team in terms of speed of decision making, especially. And times of imperfect information. So this is probably the biggest area of my own development I've had to work on transitioning into founding terminal. But as a leadership team, we examine and scrutinize our decisions weekly, not just based on the outcomes of the decisions, but how quickly we're able to make those decisions and how could we speed up that process in the future? I think that's really valuable time spent. There's actually a really good, I think, lesson from military history on this, which my co-founder Luke brought to my attention, which was there's this hot shot fighter pilot who could basically beat anyone in a dogfight in forty seconds or less.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  And he used a framework called the OODA loop, which is observe, orient, decide and act. And basically, the idea is the faster you can go through that loop, the faster you can win. And the faster you make decisions and act, the faster the chessboard is now different and your opponent needs to react to a whole new set of factors. So it's an interesting concept that's been well adopted into military strategy and I think could be emphasized more in early operating dynamics of leadership teams at startups.

• 20:29Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, I'm probably the biggest nerd on decision making, truly, it's probably one of the main reasons I'm so single. But the question around that is, what does the framework look like to review decision making, its effectiveness? And you said there kind of about the weekly meetings to discuss this. What does that assessment really look like? Is it a right and wrong?

• 20:47Speaker 02

  So not a right and wrong. I think that, again, you want to separate what were the outcomes of the decision and then how is the decision made? And oftentimes, it comes down to ownership. And being able to provide the team, both at the leadership level and then at the individual contributor level, ownership to make the decisions and making that expressly clear is super important. So when we go back on a weekly basis and look at some of those decisions, we're trying to separate outcomes from process and then speed up the process or clarify ownership across the team to make those decisions happen faster. And that's exceptionally important when you have a distributed team because we're not there to walk up and sometimes ask, hey, should we do this or do that?

• 21:31Speaker 02

  And so division of ownership and making that super clear up and down the ranks is exceptionally important. And that's what we look to examine weekly.

• 21:40Harry Stebbings?

  On prioritizing speed here, but it's super interesting though, because from speaking to your partners at Atomic, I hear you hold a very different view when it comes to prototyping. So how do you think about the value of speed when it comes to maybe product ideation and iteration?

• 21:53Speaker 02

  So there's speed in decision making that I think is tactical. And then there's crafting the right business model and offering for your target customer. So I think the prototyping phase is critical to test quickly, but not rush to market until you really believe you have the right signals that the product and the business model are right. Then you turn on the afterburners in speed of decision making to accelerate your go to market and day to day operations. And Atomic, I think, is incredible at figuring out this balance for the need of patience in prototyping with the need for speed of scaling when the signals are there.

• 22:25Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, is there ever a time where you think move fast and break things is truly applicable today?

• 22:30Speaker 02

  I don't love that phrase, I will say. I think that what you need is really clear goals of what you want to accomplish. You need clear ownership and accountability. And then you got to trust in your team to make decisions, which might not always be right. But I think that more decision making and more action ultimately leads to better outcomes because you can adjust and course correct a lot more. So I don't know about necessarily breaking things intentionally, but I do believe in speed and decision making being hypercritical.

• 23:01Harry Stebbings?

  In terms of this kind of heavy focus on product perfect and really getting that right time, you just raised a phenomenal round from many friends and guests of the show, including our wonderful advert for the show, Lightspeed, Kleiner, David Sacks, just to name a few. I'm intrigued then, when is the right time to go out and raise venture funding and really accept those growth expectations, do you think?

• 23:21Speaker 02

  So I think that really comes down to the type of business you're pursuing and what signals you agree on with your investors are the right ones to indicate you're ready. So where some startups get it wrong is that funding is a process that you just start and finish. And I think it should be a series of ongoing conversations with various VCs to get their perspectives. And that can happen very early. We actually did this basically on day one, before we were ever ready to take a check, just to learn how the Market would perceive the data and metrics we were tracking and it was super helpful and we're continuing to do this now even though we did just announce a round. So I appreciate it. We're excited about the investors we have on board.

• 24:01Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, where do you think many go wrong with this then in terms of the interaction with VCs, the growth expectations? Where do you see the commonality of mistakes?

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Looking at it purely as a process and not using the investors that are currently in the room and those out there as people who can help be a barometer for where you're tracking. And I think helping understand the signals and then the market landscape should be an ongoing conversation.

• 24:28Harry Stebbings?

  I love that. Use VCs as a barometer. What a title for the episode. I do want to move into the quickfire, which is always my favorite of any interview. So essentially Dylan, I say a short statement and then you give me your immediate thoughts. It's incredibly high octane, as you would imagine.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  I can't wait.

• 24:42Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so your favorite book and why? What must I read on my next trip out to you?

• 24:46Speaker 02

  My favorite book is probably The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. And I read this for a college course and it completely changed my understanding of almost everything by looking at evolution from the perspective of genes and these tiny codes of information and how all life form created is really just trying to replicate that code to live on to the next generation. So evolutionary psychology is fascinating and I think this is the best introduction on the topic.

• 25:13Harry Stebbings?

  What functions don't work in distributed team models?

• 25:16Speaker 02

  I think marketing is really challenging to work in a distributed model. While you need to think about localizing message and maybe having local marketing managers. It can be really challenging to keep everyone aligned on how to build and represent your brand if you distribute too much of the core brand and product marketing resources.

• 25:35Harry Stebbings?

  Geographically adjusted compensation for remote teams, is there a right or a wrong?

• 25:40Speaker 02

  It's a good question. I think it's right and market dynamics will inevitably prevail, whether that changes up or down.

• 25:47Harry Stebbings?

  I'm a big believer in Adam Smith's Invisible Hand too, so I'm glad you said that. Question from your partner Chester at Atomic. What's the biggest myth about building and running distributed teams?

• 25:56Speaker 02

  The biggest myth I think is that although we have all this Communication technology that virtual communication is sufficient to build relationships with remote workers and face to face I think still matters so much and I believe you have to earn the right to communicate digitally by being there physically and often people don't invest enough time to be there physically it is a major commitment of time and travel but I think it's totally necessary.

• 26:19Harry Stebbings?

  Dylan, tell me, what moment in your life has served as maybe an inflection point and changed the way you think?

• 26:25Speaker 02

  So my dad is a lawyer and he absolutely loves it so no hard feelings to any lawyers out there but for a long time I thought law would be a really fun and interesting career. And he told me one day, hey, be the one that hires the lawyer, don't be the lawyer. And I think that definitely made me think more seriously about a business career.

• 26:44Harry Stebbings?

  I love that. I dropped out of law school six weeks in, so I feel your pain. Question from Kevin Haas, what does it take to learn how to do a backflip?

• 26:52Speaker 02

  You know, I'm gonna refrain from answering that one. I just, I don't want Kevin getting any wild ideas out there.

• 27:00Harry Stebbings?

  My question is, can Kevin do a backflip?

• 27:02Speaker 02

  Not that I've seen, but I think you should ask him to send in a video of him trying it.

• 27:08Harry Stebbings?

  He's a man of many talents, so I wouldn't put it past him. We've mentioned some great and big names behind you. How do you think about mentorship, Dylan?

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, mentorship has been really impactful for me and especially finding people that believe in you and stick with you for the long term, kind of like finding and sticking with a great general doctor. I think it's important to stick with someone and a mentor who gets to know you, how you think, what you care about, so they can give you the best long-term advice that's personalized to you and not just generalized guidance or just what they would do.

• 27:37Harry Stebbings?

  Tell me, Dylan, final question. Next five years for you and for Terminal, what's the exciting roadmap ahead?

• 27:43Speaker 02

  I can't wait. We have amazing team, a great service that's taken years to build, and we're just excited to bring Terminal to many new regions and markets across the world. So in five years, I see Terminal being a global brand that's foundational for how the next wave of great companies will scale while bringing really significant and transformative professional opportunities to people and communities around the world.

• 28:06Harry Stebbings?

  Dylan, as I said, every single touch point I've had with the team members at Atomic, from Chester to Jack to Andrew to you, it's just been exceptional. I'm so excited for what you're building, both with Atomic and Terminal. And thank you so much for joining me today.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  Thank you, Harry. Really appreciate it.

• 28:22Harry Stebbings?

  Well, as you can tell, I absolutely loved having Dylan on the show there and I'm so excited for the future ahead with Terminal. And if you'd like to see more from Dylan, then you can on Twitter by following him on at D Serota. Likewise, it'd be fantastic to see you behind the scenes here at the 20 Minute VC. You can find us on Instagram at H Stebbings1996 with two Bs. However, before we leave you today, are you told your standards are too high? Well, The League is the app that tells you to keep them that way. They know your time is valuable, so simply tell them your preferences and they will handle the scouting and vetting for you. Plus, even better, your profile will only be seen by people who match your preferences. Matches expire after 21 days, and so there are no drawn-out games. And they even require LinkedIn to protect your privacy

• 29:04Harry Stebbings?

  and block you from matching with coworkers and business connections. I have to say, I am a big fan, and you can apply now by downloading The League on the Amp Store or heading to theleague.com. And speaking of products that I'm a fan of, you must check out Zoom, the fastest growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in a variety of activities, including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat, all-in-one platform. Plus, it's the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. But you don't have to take my word for it. Zoom is the top-rated conferencing app across various user review sites, including G2 Crowd and TrustRadius, and you can see for yourself. Sign up for a free account, not a trial, just visit zoom.us. And speaking of connecting

• 29:49Harry Stebbings?

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