#509 Job van der Voort on Building A High Performance Remote Team

Job van der Voort is co-founder and CEO of Remote. He was previously the VP of Product at Gitlab, the largest remote organization in the world. In this conversation, we discuss asynchronous communication, documentation, international payments, Gitlab, off-sites, Remote.com growth, and Bitcoin. ======================= Exodus is an absolute game changer in the crypto wallet space, and we’ve teamed up to offer an exclusive discount for you, as listeners of the podcast. Sign up for Exodus today using my promo code Exodus.com/pomp. This is a no brainer for both newcomers and crypto heavyweights - go sign up today. ======================= With over 5 Million users, Crypto.com is the easiest place to buy, and sell over 90 cryptocurrencies. They are giving away 4 Teslas! To enter the Lucky Draw, download the Crypto.com App and trade at least $100 of Bitcoin before March 8th. If you’re new to Crypto.com, you’ll also enjoy 0% credit & debit card fees in your first month. Download the Crypto.com App now: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/thepomppodcasttesla. More details about the Tesla Lucky Draw: https://bit.ly/2Z1OsRE ======================= Coinbase Wallets are adding support for .crypto and .zil domains through their partnership with Unstoppable Domains. Unstoppable Domains provides an all-in-one solution for blockchain domains. You can send money using these new domains instead of long Bitcoin wallet addresses, while also storing your domain in Coinbase's collectibles section. Go to unstoppabledomains.com in the dapp browser to register and manage your domains. =======================

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Yoob Vander Voort is co-founder and CEO of Remote. He was previously the VP of Product at GitLab, the largest remote organization in the world. In this conversation, we discuss asynchronous communication, documentation, international payments, GitLab, offsites, remote.com growth, and Bitcoin. I really enjoyed this conversation with Yoob, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Exodus. They are leading the world out of the traditional financial system by building

• 0:42Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:26Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Go buy your domain. If somebody buys the one you want before you get it, you can't have it. It's like regular domains. Google got www.google.com. No one else can have it. Same thing here. Nobody else can have pomp.crypto because I own it. So go and get your unstoppable domain at unstoppabledomains.com and get it before they're out. All right, let's get into this episode with Yob. I hope you enjoy it.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:51Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Yob here with me. Thank you so much for doing this.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Thanks, thanks for having me, Anthony.

• 3:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Very sure. Let's just jump right into your background. What did you do before remote.com?

• 4:02Speaker 02

  I have a background in neuroscience. So I worked as a neuroscientist for a number of years and I left that because I discovered hacker news and I wanted to be part of tech. I started first by starting a startup. It went nowhere. I ran out of money within three months and I had zero money left. So I had to find a job. I started working as a programmer somewhere in the Netherlands. And there I met Sid, who was starting this crazy little startup. And he was like, yeah, you maybe should join me. The startup turned out to be GitLab. So I joined the team when it was founded and helped grow that to 500 employees yourself for five years. And I left GitLab specifically to found remote. So that's a real short story.

• 4:41Anthony Pompliano?

  We got to talk about GitLab real quick because I think there's a lot of people who who find that story fascinating. What was your biggest learning or takeaway from those five years?

• 4:50Speaker 02

  I think the the single biggest learning was that you can build a highly successful team without ever having an office, without, you know, ever seeing your colleagues, or at least maybe once a year. Do that all online. And not just you can do it. I think the one thing that we've learned was that there are so many advantages to doing that, that, you know, and everybody's learning this today, that this is probably the preferred way of building a business. It's it's much more efficient and it gives significantly more freedom to individuals. You just have to learn to live without an office.

• 5:24Anthony Pompliano?

  So what is the secret to doing it though, right? It's we know it's possible. We see some examples. GitLab, I think, is the largest remote company in the world. What is the secret to making it a high-performance team?

• 5:36Speaker 02

  That's a that's a good question. I don't think there's one secret. I do think that there's a few realizations you have to make. One is you get a lot of stuff for free with an office. You walk into the office, you see your colleagues, you see them at the water cooler, all those like micro interactions, even just seeing people at their desk. You get them for free in an office. You completely lose them in a remote setting, but they need to be replaced. And it means that, because what do they do? They help build cohesion within your team. They make sure that people bond with each other. And it makes that they have a better rapport with each other and it makes working together easier and collaboration easier. And, you know, there's more serendipity, as people often say. And so in a remote setting, you get a lot of stuff for free, but that you don't get for free.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  And what you have to do to solve that is you have to create those moments where people come together. There's not an agenda or not necessarily an agenda. There is maybe something that That takes away your focus so that you're not just focused on talking with each other. And it can be playing a game, having like just a hangout together, you know, virtual drinks, whatever else. But you need to create those kind of moments and you need to do that consistently. You have to do that at different times to accommodate for people's schedules. You have to do that for different interests because not everybody's interested in hanging out in a particular way. Not everybody is interested in games. And so that takes significant efforts to be able to achieve that.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  But if you do achieve that, that basically solves the biggest problem of remote work, which is that, yeah, the feeling that you lose serendipity and you're feeling that you lose this office sense.

• 7:10Anthony Pompliano?

  So it sounds like intentionality becomes a core piece. What about like systemization of stuff? I think that's one thing I've heard from a lot of folks. It's just like you've got to build different types of systems, but also a lot more systems because you've got to be more intentional about how the work gets done.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the most fundamental thing is that you have to think about the single source of truth for any piece of information. And in that single source of truth, you have to log everything, every decision, every action, every event. And so that means that if you are talking about your company culture, for example, there has to be a company handbook. Everybody has to regularly contribute to that and update it. Everybody has to regularly read it and search through it. That's the simplest of things and it's basically if you start a remote organization, open a company handbook. But this relates to literally everything you do. If you are working on a project, you use some project management tool, then you have to make sure that if you and I have a discussion about something,

• 8:09Speaker 02

  about a particular task in there, that we write down, this is what we discussed and this is the conclusion we had. And if you don't do that, what is going to happen is that you're going to create an organization where people have to constantly ping each other and they have to call each other. They have to send each other Slack messages. And this is actually one of those things that you hear very often, right? Like I hate working remotely because I feel like I'm always being attacked by notifications. And the problem is is that you have to, you're not writing things down. People can self-serve to the information. And so you have to create a system for this and the system has to be. Write everything down, write down decisions, write down actions. Doesn't have to be good, doesn't have to be long, it doesn't have to be elaborate. It has to be something. If you write something down, that's a lot, much better than than nothing.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  And that something has to live in the one place where you write things down. So you can't, you can, you can also not have like, you know, Google Docs is a great tool, but really bad for this. Because they're hard to parse through and you're going to end up with a million docs. And you're going to have to ping people not to ask what is the outcome. But you're going to ask them, where is this Google Doc? And so you need to have like a tool like Notion or, you know, if you use project management tool like Asana, where you write down, this is where this information lives and everybody knows where to find it. That is absolutely fundamental. Without that, your organization is going to be feel horrible because you always have to be on calls.

• 9:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's so funny too, because what the intentionality and the systematization really does is it leads to a more efficient organization as well. Like there's something to be said, if you took that same intentionality and brought it to the regular workplace, how much more productive would people be in office as well, right? So it makes a lot of sense. I want to go through a hypothetical situation, right? You've built a number of remote teams. You run a company that is specifically focused on people running remote teams. And the hypothetical situation is I today, I run a business, it's fully centralized. I want to run a remote organization. How do I basically remote enable my business? So kind of, let's start at the very beginning. I made the decision, okay, I want to become a remote organization. What do I do? What are those first steps or first considerations that I should look at?

• 10:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I think exactly what I was just saying, you have to have a place for documentation, even if it's just to write down like, this is how we work. And many offices don't have that because, you know, you walk into the office, sit at your desk. That's how you work. If you have a meeting, you go to the meeting room. So you start there. I'm going to create some sort of documentation where everybody can contribute and help that, help expand that. And I'm going to write down, this is how we work. And how we work starts with, we all work 100% of the time remote. It means that you can be in the office, you can be at home, you can be the other side of the planet. But your behavior should always be the same. And those behaviors are exactly what I was just saying, which is you write down.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Decisions, you write down processes as a new process come up or processes that might exist or may change. And anything that you do has to be remote accessible. So even if everybody's still going to the office, you know, most of the days, you have to start running meetings as if a remote participant might join. And that means that if you're in an office, then, you know, and you sit in a meeting room, you have to have a setup there that makes sure that people can join from the outside. Or, and this is actually what we end up doing sometimes at GitLab, is we were in the same building, but everybody sat behind their laptops on Zoom, which feels very weird, but it's very useful because it makes that the difference between remote participants and local participants is near zero. Everybody has the same exact view.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  That is where you start. You start by writing those decisions down and saying, this is how we work. Everything else is essentially secondary, depends on like what your preferences are. I think, you know, the most, and we see this at remote very frequently because of what we do. But the nicest thing is that the moment you start doing that, you realize that there's no necessity to be in the office anymore. And if there's no necessity to be in the office, you know, the pool of people that I can hire goes from the ones that want to live close to the office or live already close to the office to literally the entire world. And that's of course, you know, very powerful.

• 12:11Anthony Pompliano?

  So after I decide, okay, I'm going to do documentation. I'm going to be remote first, a hundred percent remote, as you described it. How do I go about evaluating these tools, right? It feels like everyone now sees that there's this remote shift happening and everyone's building tools all over the place. And rather than being attacked by notifications, I'm attacked by all these different product pitches. What are some of the things I should look for in the tools? Or how should I go about evaluating what actually is going to be effective for me and my organization?

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, this space is moving incredibly fast. So like, what I'm going to say today is going to be completely outdated in a year from now. So I'm going to be very careful about that. I think there's a big difference in tools made for small teams compared to large teams. So with small teams, I mean, you know, teams smaller than 20 or so people, you will have to make decisions for the entire organization. So if your organization is significantly larger, the amount of tools that you can actually use becomes very, very, very, very slim. First thing, don't.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  Go too crazy with tools. You don't want to have a million tools. Like it just overwhelms people, right? The onboarding experience of joining an organization and being told like, well, these are the 20 tools we use. And then you have to learn what information goes where. That's not a good experience. So that's where I would start. I would start very simple. You need something to do video calls. If your team is big, it has to be Zoom. Nothing else supports large amount of teams, right? At Remote, we have like a hundred something employees. Zoom is the only one that will really work. But if you have a smaller team, there's loads of amazing companies, for example, Whereby that build really nice video tools. And then it's just a matter of flavor, like what do you, what do you, what do you like? What do you, it doesn't really matter. It just has to get a point across.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  Beyond that, I would say, as we were discussing earlier, there has to be some sort of tool that gives you a sense of presence. And the best way to easily reach this is to have an audio only tool. So you can use Zoom for this, but it's actually kind of heavyweight. And there's lots of really great tools that you can use specifically for this. And the whole purpose of the tool should be, I join a room or whatever, a channel. And I can talk with my colleagues while also doing other work. So it feels like easy, low threshold to join. It doesn't feel like heavy, like the people are watching me while I'm doing it. And I can talk with my colleagues and I can easily leave or switch channels. And there's also lots of tools for this. Tandem is pretty good, which connects directly to Slack.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  But what we use at Remote, for example, we just use Discord, which is, you know, used by millions of people around the world. And it's actually really, really great for this. And then, you know, the documentation piece is really tricky. There's very few tools today that are good, let alone tools that are great at scale. I would say that there's zero tools that are great at scale. At GitLab, we did it fully custom. We used GitLab. We polished that as a static website. And that was good because it forces to build a lot of features into GitLab to make it easier to use that. But it's still not like the ideal experience. I think tools like Notion and Slides and Coda and Almanac. Those are really great tools to do this, but they are not yet made for very large teams.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  So at Remote today, we use Notion. Internally and in our notion had a bunch of downtime recently. That's very painful if that's like your most important source of information. But also it's like we have so much information there today that the search is not very good. So that's still very early days. My answer to that is like literally just try out what works for you. Like it's very early days. I think none of them are good enough yet to like support larger teams. But if your team is like, you know, below 20 people can you basically use all of them. Make it all pretty, pretty good. And that's it. And then beyond that, you probably already have a project management tool. If it's not online or accessible online, I don't know what tool you're using. So probably already good in terms of tools.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  And, you know, I would say, you know, make a decision in your company about how you're like, what kind of communication is expected. So you have teams that say, well, we are fully asynchronous. So we, it's not important to be responsive to messages in Slack. For example, there's many teams that nowadays choose to like not use Slack at all. And they use something like Twist or the new one that was just released, Quail, which looks really nice. But most teams just use Slack and it's fine or Microsoft Teams. And then that's basically it. Beyond that, it's all the tools that you're already using, project management tools, CRM, etc.

• 16:31Anthony Pompliano?

  So one of the things I want to talk about is this idea of asynchronous communication versus synchronous. First, just describe kind of the two different camps of thought and then what you see as the pros and cons between the two.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's one versus the other. I think that's, that's an important start. Right now we are talking synchronously, right? We're in the same time, we're at the same location, directly replying to each other, which is very good. And it's, you know, it's the most personal way to communicate and it's great for a quick back and forth. If we were to do this asynchronously, what would happen is you would ask me a question. I would answer it whenever I wanted, which makes the cycle time of having a conversation extremely long. The advantage of asynchronous communication is that if there's no expectation of a direct answer, it means that I can reorganize my own time. So I can have a block of work in the middle of the day of four hours where I say, I'm doing deep work and I'm not responding to any incoming things, notifications from Slack and whatever.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  And then I squeeze in all the little messages, requests and everything else in a particular block in the day. And I'm going to respond to them there. That is really what asynchronous work is all about, that you get the freedom to reorganize your own time and respond to things whenever it's best for you. And there's two reasons to do this. One is that if you start working remotely, you immediately run into the need to have flexible time. You don't have to be in the office anymore, might as well just work whenever you want. And the second one is, is that if you do that, that if you have flexible time, you can hire from anywhere and people will be in other time zones and they will be sleeping when you're working, which is, which essentially makes this required.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  And so that's what asynchronous work allows. It's very important to realize that it's not, one is not a replacement for the other. You can work asynchronously most of the time. It's still very pleasant to just talk to someone. And if you have a quick back and forth, or if you really want to collaborate on something, yeah, you should probably just set up a call or like work together at the same time in like Figma on the design. That's essential to work. So I wouldn't necessarily, like the remotes, we do a lot of asynchronous work, but we do a lot of synchronous work as well. It would be impossible to just, actually, now that I'm saying it, Almanac, this company that makes one of these docs, they did an async week last week where they only worked asynchronously. So there were no Slack messages, there were no calls, whatsoever, there were no scheduled

• 18:56Speaker 02

  meetings, and they only work asynchronously. And I think one of the things that happens if you do that, one, is you feel like you have a lot of time to get work done. It's great, but the downside is you feel alone. Like, you're just doing work by yourself and no one responds to you. And that's, that's not the most pleasant experience. So, yeah. Procedures both, but asynchronous work is fundamental to making remote work work well.

• 19:20Anthony Pompliano?

  I want to talk also about another form of the synchronous communication. You alluded to it earlier. It's this idea of almost, whether it's a Zoom room, right, where kind of somebody has a personal room, you can jump in at a certain time and you know they'll be there, whether it's some sort of audio communication where everyone's just kind of hanging out, the audio's on, if you want to talk, you could talk, if not, then you're just all kind of doing work. What do you find is, one, the best way to do it, you mentioned Discord for you guys, but are there other specific? Tools and then two, like, what is the best way to implement something like that? Is it literally just, hey, everyone's gonna get on at 11 o'clock, we're gonna stay on for two hours? Uh, and we'll figure it out? Or is there more kind of intentionality to it around, uh, maybe, hey, for the first 30 minutes, we're gonna do something and then there's an hour and a half of everyone just kind of being connected. If you wanna talk, you can.

• 20:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, how do you guys actually run those time blocks where everyone is in a synchronous situation? But it's a little bit more passive than active?

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, actually, we do multiple things. Um, and so, and we use different tools for different things. So we have, uh, six times a week bonding time, which is a 30-minute block. And two, uh, and it's spread for me, I'm in Europe, so in the early morning for me and in the late day for me. So that in one time I overlap with APAC and the other time I overlap with the US. We have people all over the world. And that's a Zoom room. And we tend to have an icebreaker question, like, you know, what is the best food you ever ate? Or, you know, something more interesting than that. Uh, and that's then everybody joins a Zoom room, opt in, and you just talk with each other. But then what we have, we have an hangout. And so what the hangout is, it's always open. We use Discord for this, but there's many tools. There's a tandem that I mentioned earlier, but there's also tools that simulate an office environment.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  So you have like a 2D map and you can walk around it, like a branch, for example. And, um, those are always on. And so our Discord audio channel is always on. And sometimes people leave messages in Slack to say like, I am in Discord, I'm hanging out there. But it's always on. People just join whatever they feel like throughout the day. And people go in and in and out, out. And, uh, yeah, you just, you set it up, you create an expectation around the organization. And then in the beginning, especially if your team is larger, you have to seed it a little bit. So you have to like, especially as leadership, hang out there very frequently. Tell people, I'm hanging out here, you know, come chat with me. But over time, people start to pick it up and they, you know, hang out there and chat with each other. But yeah, it's just a matter of like, setting up the Discord, buying this app and just always having it on.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  And it's, it's nice. It actually creates this idea of like, there's some presence, which is, you know, one of the things that you lose with remote work is a sense of presence. And this helps them.

• 21:50Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. Uh, let's talk about offsites. Uh, so the whole idea of like bringing people together physically, uh, in the same location versus having people be, uh, remote all the time. What's the best practices there and how do you guys run those?

• 22:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, since COVID, we haven't done anything. But and before COVID, we were a very small team and we would actually meet up every single month because we were all in the same country at the same at the time. So it was very, very easy. My but the way we are going to do it post vaccine at remote is very similar to how we did it at GitLab, which is once a year, once every nine months, bring the whole company together at great expense in a nice location, in a hotel and for several days, and then just focus on bonding and having fun. So not the work, getting work done, not making plans, but just about bonding within the team. And then provide budget so that people are encouraged to meet up either locally or even

• 22:47Speaker 02

  throughout the world. So one thing two of my colleagues at GitLab did is they spent six months traveling the whole world and they went to different colleagues in different countries. And so we had a policy which essentially came down to, well, you're going to get X budget if you visit one person. So if you're going to visit like 10 different colleagues, your your budget increases. Generally, I would say we strongly encourage people to get together because it's nice. And so at remote, we have a policy, we will pay for lunch. If there's like four colleagues coming together, we will always pay for lunch because we want them to do that. And then the time you spend however you want it. It's nice to work together, but it's also nice to just hang out.

• 23:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And so I guess as part of this, do you think about bringing the entire team together at any one point? Or is it actually more advantageous to say, hey, everyone in APAC or everyone in the US, everyone in Europe, and almost do it like on a team product or like a division standpoint? Like, I guess you've been doing this for so long, like you've probably seen people do everything and try all these different things. What are the pros and cons?

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, we tried both. And at GitLab, we kept doing, and we're going to do the same at remote, at least having one, everybody get together a year, which is really hard to pull off because it's not going to be everybody. It's going to be 70, 75% or so. Some people have to fly for 24 hours. You know, if you're deep in India and you're meeting in the middle of the US, it's horrible. You're going to be people that are going to get stuck in, you know, in border control, which also happened a bunch of times. But it is something special. You know, I, the one thing that I, you know, Remote grew really fast over the past year. And sometimes I still have like, is this really real? You know, like we have our all hands and I see like a hundred people behind their camera. But I'm like, is this real?

• 24:32Speaker 02

  And I think the nice thing about like really bringing everybody together is exactly that. It's like, well, you, it feels real and it's, it's nice to, you know, have dinner with these people and like see everybody together. It's something special and there, there's something there and I, I think it's worth spending the, the money on. Um, bringing teams locally together or even just like particular regions has certainly similar kind of benefits. Um, but uh, yeah, it's more restricted. It's more, you know, where are you going to make the cutoff? It's, it's more difficult to do. I think what, what works really well is you, if you do it by, you know, the sales team gets together. You know, the sales team has an offsite and then yes, people still fly, fly all over the world, but it's a smaller team, which makes it much more manageable.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Or for example, a team that works on a particular product.

• 25:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. When you think through, uh, remote.com, go back to, you know, last year, uh, before the pandemic hits, you've got this idea. What was that original idea? And then walk me through kind of what's transpired over the last 12 months or so, because as you mentioned, uh, you have grown very, very quickly.

• 25:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, so I left GitLab specifically to solve the problem we faced there, which is every time we would interview someone and then try to hire someone in a country where I never hired someone before, we are faced with how do we pay them? How do we, you know, make sure we're compliant? How do we provide them benefits? And it turns out if you hire someone in a different country, you have to comply with local labor laws. And that means you have to run local payroll and to run local payroll, you have to have a local entity and a local bank account. It's a lot of work. And so there's a bunch of vendors in the world that tried to solve that problem and they did a terrible job. So terrible that we would lose employees because they said, well, I, I can't count on receiving my pay slip or even my money on time.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  So Remote was founded specifically to solve that problem. Um, and early on we thought, well, we're just going to work with a bunch of local partners and it's. You know, that will allow us to do exactly this. What we discovered really quickly was that that is not viable for us. We want to create like a really excellent business. We want to be very fast, but we also want to be very cost effective. And the only way for us to really do that is vertically integrate. And so we founded Remote in early 2019, and we spent, you know, about 14, 16 months, just setting up the infrastructure so we could be able to run payroll in, at the time, four different countries only, and actually employ people

• 26:59Speaker 02

  as employer of record for other organizations. So it took us a very long time. And April last year, we started opening the doors to, you know, run payroll, provide benefits, et cetera, for employers. And I think in May or so, we started with the first few employees. And yeah, we were starting to feel already the pressure, because, you know, in March, COVID happened across the world. Sunday, there was a huge boom, boom related to remote work. We had, we were called Remote. It's, it's a pretty good name to have in this time. And the demand was overwhelming. For us, to be able to open a new country, it takes anywhere between three

• 27:40Speaker 02

  months to more than a year, and a significant expense. It's a very complicated process. So we saw massive demand, and we tried to expand to as many countries as possible. And yeah, so we went that year from, you know, doing nothing in revenue to doing millions in revenue by the end of the year. Our team scaling, I think, from 10 or 15 people early in the year to over 80 by the end of the year. And today, I think about 140 internally.

• 28:04Anthony Pompliano?

  What's been the craziest part about it all? You mentioned earlier, like when you saw the wall of all the videos, but what's been like the biggest surprise or the thing that just has hit you and been like, wow, this is working?

• 28:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, the mission of the company is to just provide opportunities to, to people everywhere. And it, I think it is really cool to see the amount of people that are now able to like get jobs, really well-paying jobs with really amazing companies. We see really, really cool companies as our customers that hire people literally all over the world, often in countries where, you know, I didn't know where they were before, until we opened a branch there, or, you know, like I had no idea about. And I think one of the nice things is, is that We look at the data and everybody that is employed through us is really well compensated, like really well compensated. And that's very inspiring because I, that's what I believe in.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  I live in the middle of nowhere myself and I think like it doesn't really, it should not really matter where you live, where you grow up, or where you have to be because of, you know, family reasons, for example, you should still be able to earn like a, a great wage, you know, you should be able to have an awesome job and like have a good career. You shouldn't have to move to a particular city. And yeah, we're seeing that that's possible and that's, that's, that feels, you know, when it was like one or two people, I was like, yeah, you know, it's a fluke, man. These people don't know what they're doing. But now we have hundreds of people employed through us and that's really, really cool.

• 29:32Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. When you think about the international hires, payment complexity is one of the biggest nightmares when it comes to all of this. There's a lot of people who think that Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies could be the solution there. You guys, for a number of reasons we'll get into, can't really use some of those currencies or digital currencies as a solution. Talk us through just what are the problems first with the international payment and payroll? And then we can talk about some of the solutions that you've had to build.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, so payroll itself is complicated, but you can figure it out. But the payments are the real pain. So there's a lot to unpack here. First off, if you are employed locally, you have to be paid in local currency. So if you're employed in the Netherlands, you get euro. You know, if you're employed in the United States, you have to be paid in USD. Those are easy. In many countries, the local currency can be either highly volatile or it can just be very hard to find anyone that can actually convert a currency for you. That's actually, it can actually be a problem. On top of that, receiving money is harder than it sounds in many different places.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  We often have, and often as in like literally every day, problems paying directly into someone's bank account in a particular location. Either people don't have a bank account, which still happens, there's a lot of cash only places, or bank account, banks are just unreliable or hard to work with. Or don't support, you know, modern ways of transacting money. There's an infinite amount of problems. And then for us specifically, we have to, we tend to have a local bank account. Opening a local bank account is incredibly difficult. It's harder to open a local bank account than it is to set up a local entity. In most cases, I had to fly to multiple countries and post COVID, I had to do all sorts of weird things.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  I literally have different colored pens on my desk because I have to wet sign so many documents every day. Like it's the kind of stuff, just to open a bank account is crazy. And then once we're there, it still tends to be incredibly hard to just work with them at all. And then we, as a business, we have to think about, you know, our customers, they, we invoice them in whatever currency they want. And then we want to pay out directly in local currency. But we have to account for currency fluctuations and we have to somehow deal with, with FX there. That's, that's really challenging as well. And then once you think, well, you know, what I'm going to do is I'm going to hedge, right? I'm going to hedge a little bit on the currency. That's not allowed. You, you can't do that.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  You have to have a specific license to, to be able to hedge fund. So like, okay, well, what we're going to do is we're going to estimate how much it's going to cost. And then we're going to charge this. Well, now instead of just like paying someone a salary, you're charging for a product. So you have to charge, you have to pay taxes over that bid that you're like, that's your fake hedge. Like there's no way out and, and we face this every single day. And so, you know, we work with a number of like really large partner banks that have bank accounts all over the world. And it makes it easier, but it does not solve any of these issues, particularly compliance issues that keep biting us. It's, it's a nightmare.

• 32:48Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I can tell that it's a nightmare just listening to you talk about it. And so the idea is that like cryptocurrencies, there, it's nearly impossible to use because of all the compliance laws, right? So there's, there's technical solutions, but they don't meet the regulatory solutions in some situations or they aren't regulatory solutions. And so therefore you're basically pushed back into what ends up being likely inferior technology that you have to use to, to comply, correct?

• 33:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's basically it. Yeah, no, for sure, that's inferior technologies. It can take days for transactions to complete. Even then, they often bounce. We have all sorts of problems with it. No, cryptocurrency has a huge potential to solve these kind of things, but it's never allowed. We always have to pay in local currency. There's exceptions to this. Like if someone is a contractor, they're willing to accept it. Or, you know, you could imagine, we haven't done this, but you could totally imagine like setting up something local that then automatically converts into cryptocurrency if everybody, you know, agrees with that. But it's never allowed for us to directly pay someone in a cryptocurrency if they're legally employed by us. You know, in fact, the local governments are nowhere near, in terms of bureaucracy, in terms of laws,

• 33:57Speaker 02

  nowhere near thinking about cryptocurrency. They're not even aware of the state that you can hire someone in a different country. I think that's in itself already a thing that we have to fight. In the majority of countries in which we operate, we have to explain what we do. And then they say, oh, you mean offshoring? And we said, no, companies just hire great people. They just haven't to live in your country. And like, that's already, pre-COVID especially, but still today, it's a really big challenge that we face. And so, yeah, I, yeah, it's horrible. Yeah, cryptocurrency really, like, it is a solution. Like, it is a solution. It would be great if we could just, you know, use Bitcoin for all of this. And it would totally solve everything. It would be instant. You would have it wherever you want it. We don't have to worry about borders.

• 34:40Speaker 02

  But now we are constantly thinking about all sorts of bank accounts. We have virtual bank accounts for customers, employees, and then we have to transact locally. It's, yeah, it's a nightmare.

• 34:49Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about kind of zooming out and looking forward five or 10 years, is every company remote? Are there still companies that are heavily centralized going into offices? Is it kind of a coexistence, like the centralized in-office companies have a remote option? Just where do you think this is all going?

• 35:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there's a few things. I think not everybody wants to work from home, right? So you're gonna want to have a place out of your home to be able to work from. And I think, you know, there will be plenty of companies that will provide office space. Of course, there's plenty of coworking space and those will continue to do better and better. But there will be many companies that will continue to have offices or even prefer to have offices. But I do think is that governments and laws are pushing for, you know, like sort of forcing remote work in a lot of ways. We see this in the Netherlands where the law essentially states like, unless there's really good reason that you cannot do your work remotely, any individual should be allowed to do all of their work remotely if they please.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  And that's the direction we're going into, especially for like tech companies or companies that have, you know, valuable talent. It's not doable to just seek your immediate surrounding anymore. Like if you want to find a great developer, there's thousands right now looking for a remote job. But if you happen to live in location X, there might be three around you. So we all see a push in law towards allowing remote work. But I think in reality, there's going to be many companies that will still have offices, but more and more they will go to like flex kind of offices or, you know, offices where, you know, a small subset of the people will be, there will be notable exceptions, I think. I think companies that will say, well, we like to work from the office.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  And I think there will be many people that are very loudly will proclaim, I will always work from an office, but it's to be expected, I think. I think it's fine. Like we will never get an office at remote, other than the ones that local governments force us to have, of which we have a few. If we were to have a big office, I would also enjoy going there. Like I don't, I'm not the person that's like against that. I just, I just value the freedom that remote work gives me more than being in that kind of office. And that's the trend I think it will go.

• 36:59Anthony Pompliano?

  I think it makes a ton of sense and it feels like to me this is a trend that is not going to slow down anytime soon. Before we get into rapid fire questions to wrap it up and then you could ask me one question. Where should we send people to find you on the internet or find more about remote.com?

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, remote is very easy, remote.com. I can't get it wrong. And me, you can email me directly. It's just [email protected] or you can find me on Twitter, which is my first name, V O, yop V O.

• 37:27Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Before we get into rapid fire, how did you get the URL? There's gotta be a good story here.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  No, someone else was running business on it. So I said, you know, I have a good idea. I think I could do better at what you're doing right now. And I'm lucky that like the owners of them, they they worked with me and my co-founder Marcelo and, you know, we came to an agreement. They're small shareholders in remote today. So that's, that's how it worked out. So I don't like to say that it was expensive. I guess probably an understatement, given how well remote is doing.

• 37:55Anthony Pompliano?

  I was gonna say they're probably very, very happy that they did that deal, right?

• 37:59Speaker 02

  They're, they're, you know, they are entrepreneurs themselves and they're doing, doing well. But yeah, I don't think they might.

• 38:05Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. All right. First question is, what is the most important book that you've ever read?

• 38:11Speaker 02

  I think it's, it's The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Head by Oliver Sacks. It's a really, really fun book. It's not very long. It's like 200 pages. And the reason why I say that book is because that set me off on like studying neuroscience, becoming like great deterministic person in sense of like how I think about the world. And in neuroscience, I think that I got the foundation of the person who I am and how I think about things, which is you have to really know your shit. That's how I think about it. Like if you don't, if you don't know something, you just shut up and you make sure that you figure out what and that, yeah. So and that book basically started all that off. I love that book and I read it through it in like one day and that's the start of the whole journey.

• 38:56Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a great suggestion. Second question is more personal, sleep schedule. I used to not sleep at all. And then our friends over at Eight Sleep got me on this thermo-regulated bed. I basically crank it as cold as possible, sleep like a baby, sleep eight or nine hours now and feel like my life's been changed. What is your sleep schedule and how has that changed over time?

• 39:16Speaker 02

  I wanted eight sleeps so bad. I don't think they ship them to Portugal or in the Netherlands. I wanted so bad.

• 39:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I'll help you get one. Don't tell anybody.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  Okay, good. Yes, thanks.

• 39:26Anthony Pompliano?

  They're gonna kill me for every time I talk to someone in Europe, like, they don't ship here. I'm like, oh, let's see what we can figure out. We'll figure it out.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, that's awesome. Yeah, I really want one. I have two kids, one of two and one of seven months, so easily.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  I go to, I work really hard. I take care of them, and so I sleep when they let me, and I wake up whenever they wake up. So this morning, you know, last night I went to bed at 11 and I woke up at 6:30 because my daughter jumped on me, so that's it.

• 39:56Anthony Pompliano?

  I have two types of people who don't get great sleep, either workaholics or people with young kids. Those are the two times when people don't get good sleep. So you fit in one category for sure. Last question is about aliens. Are you a believer or a non-believer?

• 40:11Speaker 02

  No, I think there's a good chance that there's some life somewhere, given the size of the of the of the universe and amount of stars and planets there are. I think one interesting thing I think about very often is how how poorly we can actually observe the universe directly from the Earth or even through satellites, right? If you think about, if we think about like how many moons Jupiter has, for example, you know, we're like, oh, there's a lot of them. But now and then, there are some that we are, we're not sure if there's another moon. There could be another moon. And you're like, but the solar system, we know that really, really well. And if you think about like the fact that we know that so poorly and that the universe is so incredibly big, like, yeah, I think it's

• 40:54Speaker 02

  reasonable that there's life somewhere. I would, and you know, I'd be curious to see it or meet it, whatever, whatever it would be.

• 41:02Anthony Pompliano?

  I definitely think there's life out there somewhere, so we'll see. What one question you have for me to finish up?

• 41:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you know, we think a lot about creating opportunity anywhere and sort of blurring borders, right? I think borders are, you know, the bane of my existence. And I think the internet helps a lot with that. And I think, you know, tools like Zoom and it's easiest, but in the future, like VR and AR. What do you think the future of countries is like? Will there still be countries in, I don't know how many years?

• 41:37Anthony Pompliano?

  I think there will definitely be countries. I kind of think of that as like, that's a manifestation of the physical and analog world, right? Is people will always argue over who owns what land and where the line is and, you know, all that kind of crazy stuff. And then, you know, there's a very strong argument for good governance, right? And I think that it's easy for us all to latch on to the bad governance of governments and say, you know, look, these idiots, they're just wasting money and making our lives harder. But but they do provide a lot of good benefits as well in cases, right? Everything from national defense all the way on down. And so I think that it's not a thing of like, will they ever disappear? It's more so like, what will they look like? And I think the part that I'm most excited about is competition in the open market. So if people can now

• 42:19Anthony Pompliano?

  live wherever they want, governments will compete for those citizens. And you see that, you know, inside the United States, you see cities and states and doing it kind of on a more micro level. But on the macro level, you're going to see countries do it. And so if all of a sudden you can choose between, you know, Estonia, Singapore, Portugal, the United States, I don't know, Argentina, or Nigeria, where are you going to go? Like, there's a couple of core things that people care about. And so I think that having that competition is a good thing. It'll ultimately breed kind of much stronger nation states and much more attractive environments for the citizens that choose to work within those nation states. But I think that that's probably one of the most exciting, yet most misunderstood

• 43:02Anthony Pompliano?

  things about the future. Like, what does it look like? I have no clue. It just feels like free market competition is good for everyone, right?

• 43:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what I hope the direction we're going into. You know, I have, as an EU citizen, I have a lot of freedoms within the EU and even outside of the EU. But I have friends, you know, from Ukraine, for example, that are severely limited in where they can travel. And even if they travel, it's a pain, even to like very otherwise, you know, very open countries. And my hope is that, you know, borders dissipate with this competition. And I'm curious to see if everybody's going to live in Portugal where the weather is always good, or whether, you know, it will actually be more evenly distributed.

• 43:43Anthony Pompliano?

  You are Portugal's number one salesman.

• 43:48Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. All right, listen, thank you so much for doing this. I really, really enjoyed it. I think that what you guys are building is obviously a no-brainer, and the remote trend is not going to slow down anytime soon. So if anyone out there is thinking about moving to a remote organization or running one, I heavily suggest go check out remote.com. They pretty much have everything you need in order to run your organization, do payroll, pay people, et cetera, and do it all in a compliant way. So I appreciate the time. I'll do this again in the future.

• 44:16Speaker 02

  Thanks, Anthony.