#417: Chris Herd on The Future of Work

Chris Herd is the Founder and CEO of Firstbase, which provides remote teams with all the tools they need to be as safe, comfortable, and productive at home as they could be in office. In this conversation, we discuss the emerging trends of remote work, how companies are changing their operations, and what employees need to know as corporations transition to a remote-first world. ======================= Crypto.com is the only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users currently using the Crypto.com app. Download and earn $50 USD using my code ‘pomp2020’, or use the link https://platinum.crypto.com/r/pomp2020 when you sign up for one of their metal cards today. ======================= 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. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 80,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

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

• 0:00Anthony 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.

• 0:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Chris Herd is the founder and CEO of FirstBase, which provides remote teams with all the tools they need to be as safe, comfortable, and productive at home as they could be in an office. In this conversation, we discuss the emerging trends of remote work, how companies are changing their operations, and what employees need to know as corporations transition to a remote-first world. I really enjoyed this conversation with Chris, and I hope you do as well. But before we get into the episode, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Crypto.com. They're an all-in-one platform that allows you to buy, sell, store, earn, loan, or invest crypto, all from one place. That's right, Crypto.com's got an all-in-one platform that allows you to buy, sell, store, earn, loan, or invest,

• 0:52Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:36Anthony Pompliano?

  to you. So Coinbase Wallets is now adding support for these .crypto domains through their partnership with Unstoppable Domains. Unstoppable Domains provides an all-in-one solution for the blockchain domains, and you can now send money using these new domains instead of long Bitcoin wallet addresses. So, just like in the regular world, if somebody buys the URL, you can't get it. There's only one of them. If you want to have a .crypto domain, and you've got a specific name in mind, I've got pomp.crypto, you need to go to Unstoppable Domains. domains.com right now and go pick it up before somebody else gets it. Go get your name, go get the name of your company, go get some cool domain that you think is going to be valuable in the future.

• 2:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Whatever you want, go get it. Dot crypto domains are now on sale at unstoppabledomains.com. And once somebody gets it, you can have it. Unstoppabledomains.com. Go do it. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 80,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Chris. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:17Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Chris here. I'm super excited to do this. Thank you so much for for joining, my friend.

• 3:25Speaker 03

  Great to be here.

• 3:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Let's jump right into your background. Kind of what did you do before you started the business? And then tell us a little bit about the business you're building.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think if I go right back to the start, I thought I was going to be a professional soccer player. Never quite made the cut or started to focus on academics before I realized I was never going to be good enough. Studied architecture, realized pretty quickly I never want to be an architect. And I think at that top point, had this like profound realization that architecture was a great generalist business degree. And the way I saw it was architecture is about extrapolating past prior precedent, applying that to the modern technology of the day to create buildings. And that's the same as the same thing as businesses are. So you look at Uber as the reinvention of the taxi industry. You would get IBM, Microsoft taking that forward with the PC.

• 4:13Speaker 03

  Spotify being the reinvention of Napster's peer-to-peer sharing. So graduated in the oil and gas industry. Was project managing these large multinational million dollar refits. And then basically, long story short, started doing a lot of other things. So writing blogs, that led to start a D C's in the UK. Fast forward two years, I'm discovering I don't want to do that anymore. And basically founded my first fintech business, which led directly into founding First Base after that.

• 4:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. And tell us a little bit about First Base and kind of what you guys are building right now.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the way we see First Base is as a physical operating system for remote work. And what that really means is we help companies with the supply of all the physical goods workers need to be as safe, comfortable and productive at home as they would be in an office. So desks and chairs, hardware and everything else.

• 5:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. So the reason why I wanted to have you come on is I'm just scrolling through Twitter, wasting time like normal. And all of a sudden I came across this thread that you put together. And the first tweet in the thread said, I've spoken to around a thousand companies over the last six months about their plans for remote work going forward. Here are a few things I learned. And I was like, oh, this will be interesting. So click on it. And I start scrolling down and immediately I was like, oh, wait a second. This guy like really did a lot of work and he pulled away a ton of stuff. So what I want to go through is I'm just going to kind of read one of the tweets and then have you elaborate on on that idea and then just kind of share with us either anecdotal stuff, data, or just kind of how you guys are thinking about the future of work here. Sound good?

• 5:48Speaker 03

  Sounds good to me.

• 5:50Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So the first one says headquarters are finished. Companies will cut their commercial office space by 40 to 60%. They'll allow every worker to work from home two to four days a week and come into the office one to two days a week.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's the easiest trend that we're seeing emerge immediately. So obviously everyone was forced into remote working. And I think the reality is you go back to pre-COVID, remote work was happening, right? There was a 400% decade over decade growth in terms of how many people were working remotely. The problem was that was being driven by people rather than companies. And now that companies have experienced that they're the ones that are driving this now. They see that remote work works. They know they can hire, rather than hiring the best person. Thirty mile radius, hire the best person on the planet. Rather than paying twenty to fifty thousand dollars per month per office space, pay two thousand dollars to provide a great place at home. So what we're hearing across the spectrum, early-stage companies,

• 6:43Speaker 03

  publicly listed tech companies, legacy incumbents with hundreds of thousands of employees, cut real estate by forty to sixty percent, let people work from home two to four days a week, come into the office one day a week.

• 6:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that's awesome. The next tweet said, "Fully distributed. Thirty percent or so of the companies we talked to are getting rid of the office entirely and going remote first. Companies doing this have seen their workers decentralized rapidly, leaving expensive cities to be closer to family."

• 7:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's, I think, anecdotal based on my experience of people I know. So people are living in San Francisco and New York. And what you've seen when the virus hit was, why do we need to be there? We're not going into the office anymore, we're not getting the benefits of the city. And in many ways, I think what you're seeing happening is the unbundling of the city in many respects. So the problem is, as companies think they want hybrid working, what they realize is that that actually dilutes the benefits of being a remote worker. You still need to go into the office, you still need to live in New York, where you've got high cost of living and a relatively low disposable income, which means that your quality of life isn't as high as it should be. So what we see happening is, people go remote, they start hybrid, and then they say, "Well, actually, I'm not going to go in the office on Mondays or Fridays. I'm not going to go in on Tuesdays."

• 7:56Speaker 03

  By three, four, or five months into that, there's no point in having an office anymore, because nobody's there.

• 8:04Anthony Pompliano?

  It's crazy to think how fast this is happening. Next tweet, "Access of talent. The first reason they are going remote first is simple. It lets them hire more talented people. Rather than hiring the best person in the thirty mile radius of the office, they can hire the best person in the world for every single role."

• 8:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think this is, this is for me is the biggest one, right? Like, you look at the tech monopolies that are in New York and San Francisco and Seattle. De facto, they can hire the best person in that city because they can pay them the highest wages. And what happened was, people started to realize, actually, I can hire the most talented person. I don't care if they're in Ohio or Colorado, wherever that is, I just want the best person to do the job. So what those remote companies have got from that is, we can hire the most talented person, whether it's in the geographic borders where we live, whether it's in the same time zone, whether it's globally around the world, it's about talent. Can we hire the best person for every role, which makes those companies far more competitive.

• 9:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Next tweet, "Cut cost." The second reason they are going remote first is because it lets them be far more cost-efficient. Rather than spending $20,000 per worker per year on office space, they can provide the best remote setup on the planet for $2,000 per worker per year.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  And that's, that $20,000 is for big cities, right? London, New York. Actually, we're talking about a company in San Francisco right now paying $50,000 per worker for 2,000 knowledge workers that do zero collaboration. And they are spending $96 million a year on commercial real estate, which, we're having the conversation, we're telling them, "You guys could pay $1,000, $2,000 a year, you could strip $96 million from your, your real estate budget, and that immediately goes to the bottom line." So not only, the prior tweet, "Do you become more talented?", you become more cost-efficient at the same time. And there's this thing that emerges off the back of that, which I would call the "remote working prisoner's dilemma," where if your competitors go more remote than you, they're

• 10:02Speaker 03

  more cost-efficient, but they're also more talented.

• 10:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that's, it's pretty crazy to think about the cost savings. Next tweet, "Remote burnout." The productivity inside the companies we've spoken to has gone through the roof. Their biggest concern is that workers burn out because they are working too hard. They are actively exploring ways to combat this.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  And I think that's that's an obvious one, right? Like everyone sort of has just delineated the line between work and play and because you couldn't leave the house. So it became really easy to lose yourself in work while we're in the midst of a global pandemic and there's nothing else to distract us. And I think there's a trust element at play here as well, right? Where companies were like, can we trust their workers to be as productive at home? Well, they found out they absolutely can. The second part then becomes, okay, well, how can we actually stop them working too much? Because actually, the challenge is, as mentioned, the tweet is, people are going to burn out because they're just doing far too much.

• 10:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Remote on sites. So different than off sites, remote on sites. 60% plus of companies we talked to are already thinking about ways to use time together physically to improve culture. The most popular we hear is flying the team into remote locations for about a week. Portugal, Spain, Puerto Rico seem to be the most popular.

• 11:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think this is super interesting. So you start to think about the implications, the second and third order effects from this. Like if you're an American company, what you really want to do is bring everyone together in a location and have everything that you need there. So facilitators, the rooms that you need, the spaces that you need. So this is a little bit more of a projection that says, these things are happening, these companies are talking about the cadence that they need to bring people together in, whether it's weekly, monthly, quarterly. They're deciding that they're going to do that. They obviously can't do that because of the current circumstances. But I think what we're going to see is these companies going to these purpose-built places that really lets them supercharge their efforts when they do have that synchronous-together time.

• 12:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and I've got a bunch of anecdotal evidence of the same thing, where people just, they want to get together, but very infrequently. So that makes a lot of sense. The next tweet says, "Personal Choice: The smartest people I know personally are all planning to work remotely this decade. The most exciting companies I know personally all plan to hire remotely this decade. About 90% of the workforces we spoke to never want to be in an office full-time ever again."

• 12:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I'll start with the last part first and there's a lot of studies with that. There was a business.com report from Vox that said 99% of people never want to go back to an office full time. Google recently released a report that their own staff were saying, "We only need to be in the office this amount of time." So 90% of people said they never had to be in an office again full time, only 10% did. And what you're talking about there with Google is the best office experience in the world and even they don't need to go back full time. And that really tells you everything that you need to know. The first two points are, that's a personal thing. Most of my friends who work in tech companies, they've just got no interest in going back to an office.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  And because they are sought after talent, they can stipulate that as a byproduct of whether they would move is, "Are you going to give me remote working or not? No, well, I'm never going to work for you again." And we're seeing the same thing with my friends who are building companies as well. So companies like Remote.com, Deal, Graphiapp.com, Comsor.com ourselves, and hundreds of other companies, they just have no intention of ever having an office. And the reality then is, well, actually, they obviously need to hire remote workers as well. You're seeing the same thing with all those large tech companies.

• 13:43Anthony Pompliano?

  The next one is my favorite topic about all of remote work, which is asynchronous by default. Is the thing that organizations are struggling with the most? The majority of companies have replicated, I'm sorry, the majority of companies have replicated the office remotely and it is causing strains that are now beginning to show. So this idea of like how to communicate synchronously or asynchronously.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  So that's, I think, a broader thesis around what offices have become, right? Offices started out as the best place to do work. You had the isolation you needed to do that deep focused work without distraction and disruption. You go into an office today, it's an adult kids club, right? It's an open plan, distraction factory place that is just super difficult to get away. People tap you on the shoulder and then you look at what asynchronous work is when you're working remotely. So what you don't really want to do is take that, what is status quo in the office. The instantaneous gratification, the inability to focus, you just don't want to take that. But for some companies, that's the easiest thing to do. And what you're going to see is some companies are not going to get any of the benefits of remote, right? They're going to destroy them all.

• 14:48Speaker 03

  And the asynchronous is about how can we empower our workers to do the best work that they've ever done by giving them that time and space they need to do it.

• 14:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and it feels like the teams that really kind of nailed this asynchronous workflow. One, they become much more productive. Two, it's a better experience, right? And they're the ones who actually are the most scalable as well. So that makes a ton of sense. The next tweet is personal injury. These are exploding. Companies haven't moved quickly enough to prevent them. And back, neck and repetitive strain injuries are becoming a huge problem. Expect this to remedy this quickly by providing better ergonomic equipment to workers.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  So this one's personal to us. So we're obviously having this conversation because companies are seeking us out to have it. Well, I think startling from a statistics standpoint is the rate that people are reporting this. So we spoke to a couple of the biggest financial institutions on the planet, people who have got 50,000 plus employees. They're hearing incidence rates of anywhere between 40 and 60% of people saying, we've got increases in back injuries. We've got increases in those things that you mentioned. And it's the reasons are obvious, right? People have reacted against this. They don't have the right tools and equipment at home to do their work. They're naturally going to get those injuries that they don't get in the office.

• 16:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Universal problems is the next tweet. It doesn't matter the size of the organization. Every company is dealing with the same thing. We spoke to early stage companies, publicly listed tech companies, and through to legacy incumbents with hundreds of thousands of employees. All of them will be remote.

• 16:25Speaker 03

  This was the most surprising thing to me. I thought we would see differences between the early stage companies, the tech companies and the legacy incumbents. I think we expected that each of them would have differing capacities to handle this, whether it was just working asynchronously, whether it was working remotely, whether it was having the tools and infrastructure in place to handle that. Nobody has this, like universally, nobody was set up for this. This is literally taking the future 15 years, taking us 15 years into the future because it's accelerated people's digital infrastructure, their capacity to hold things in the cloud and everything else in between.

• 17:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I keep saying that the virus just accelerated trends that were underway, but this may be the greatest acceleration out of all of them. The next tweet is pollution reduction. Many companies we've spoken to care massively about the environmental impact that eradicating the office and the commute will have. 108 million tons of CO2 less every single year.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think this is one of the intangibles that makes most sense as soon as you think about it. You think about commuting to the office for two hours, whether you drive or take mass transit. You think about the office being on for 24 hours a day. You think about all the things about building that, about creating that. And I think people's reaction against that as well. Am I not going to be at home more, spending more on HVAC, spending more on electricity? And yeah, obviously you are. But in terms of it being a net positive for the environment because of the commute, because of less plane travel and all those other things, environmentally, remote work is a massive net positive.

• 18:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Quality of life is the next tweet. Even more importantly, companies are realizing that they don't need to expect workers to waste two hours a day commuting to sit in an office chair for eight hours. Almost every company we talk to believes that their workers will be happier as a result of remote work.

• 18:22Speaker 03

  And the studies all say when workers are happier, they're more productive, which is obvious, right? Like, why do I want to commute for two hours a day to go to a physical location to literally use technology designed to be used anywhere on the planet? Like, we're going to tell our grandkids about this and they're going to be like, wait, you guys sat in a car, which, and then you went somewhere and you used a computer. Like, it's fucking ridiculous. It is insane. And then you think about like, actually, like, you're going to an office to spend time with people selected by your employer's HR team, where the deepest common bond you have is The continued economic success. So why would I not want to be in a position where I can spend more time with the people I choose, my friends, my family?

• 19:05Speaker 03

  I don't have to commute for two hours anymore. So what if I want to surf for an hour in the morning? Or I go for a bike ride, or I read, whatever those things are. So yeah, remote work is really, what we're really talking about isn't the future of work anymore, right? It's the future of living.

• 19:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I always joke that humans were not built to just live in an office or a cubicle, right? So this is like dead on for that. And I love the anecdote of our kids saying, wait a second, you idiots used to get in the car to drive somewhere to use a computer? Like, all right, you guys are obviously not the intelligent ones. The next one in the Twitter thread is remote pressure. A few companies we've spoken to have decided to be more remote than they initially intended because their competitors already did it. There's a fear inside companies that if they don't go remote, they will lose their best people to their competitors.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  And this is what we touched upon before around the remote prisoner's dilemma, right? You decide to go back to the office, so you can only hire the best person in a 30 mil radius. You've got the $20,000 per month, per person cost for that same office. And you just say, well, actually, what if your biggest competitors go remote? Your best people want to work remotely, therefore they're going to go and work for your biggest competitors. And then at the same time, you look at all these tech companies that are going remote as well. So in my eyes, the only people that can afford to go back to an office full time are monopolies. Every single one of them is going remote. So what does that tell you?

• 20:33Speaker 03

  If you're an accountancy firm that has had run-of-the-mill to employ the best people in Colorado or whatever state, or wherever you want to say. Now you're probably going to have to compete with Microsoft and Facebook and Google because they don't care where you live anymore. They just want the best person. So that's what that fear-driven thesis is.

• 20:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Makes sense. Let's see, the next is remote fear. Most companies aren't scared about the quality of work that will be produced. They are scared about intangible things they can't measure, quality of communication and collaboration in person, and water cooler chat. Many have realized these were excuses.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, like everyone loves the story around the water cooler, right? Remember that time we solved this massive problem around the water cooler? And then you ask them, name three. Nobody can name any time that they solved any problem around the water cooler. What most people are talking about here is you can feel busy in an office, right? And there's a huge difference between being busy and being productive and driving outcomes from the quality of your work. So all these feelings that people talk about in the office, they start to work remotely, they're three weeks into it and they're realizing, oh wait, I'm as productive working remotely in two thirds of the time as I was in the office because I just wasted the day. But well, I never wasted a day, but I spread the day out because it was easy to do that.

• 22:01Anthony Pompliano?

  The next one is output over time, which you kind of were just alluding to. The idea that the measure of performance in the office is how much time you spend sitting in your seat. The measure of performance while working remotely has to become output. Tools that enable this to be tracked more accurately are something we are asked for a lot.

• 22:20Speaker 03

  So what we're talking about is outcome. How can we deliver on processes that drive better outcomes in business? Now, me as a business owner, do I care if you, an employee, teammate, whatever you want to call it, is sat in that seat for eight hours and you're not producing anything? Some people in the office are comfortable with that. Middle management's comfortable with that. What I care about is did you deliver on the things that you promised you were going to deliver on? And if that means it only took you 20 hours and you want to go and surf and you produced incredible work, that's what I want as a business owner. And that's what remote companies need to drive towards.

• 22:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Next one, written over spoken. And this goes back some to the asynchronous stuff we were talking about earlier, but documentation is the unspoken superpower of remote teams. The most successful team members remotely will be great writers. Companies are searching for ways to do this more effectively. Tools that enable others to write better will explode.

• 23:15Speaker 03

  So you're seeing this already. You look at Rome Research and Notion and all these document taking tools and document creation tools. What they enable organizations to do is increase their muscle memory. They have one problem. They document that problem once. The entire organization gets to learn from that. So they can put in processes in place that makes that incredibly important for the growth of the business. Now, if you look at the world and the office today, typically the person who is most successful is the loudest, they're the brashest, they're the boldest. They go into a room and they dominate conversation. With remote, it's going to be a little bit more thought based than that, which I think is a massive positive for that mode of work.

• 23:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. That's a great point. The last one is flattened organizations. Middle management is in trouble. An unnecessary bottleneck which serve no tangible purpose inside asynchronous organizations. Companies need coaching and facilitators to maximize organizational effectiveness.

• 24:14Speaker 03

  And I think the important distinction here is that we're not saying flat organizations, right? We're not trying to say things like Hello Crusade, which I think there's been a massive reaction against. What we're talking about is moving the need for people to be in place to act as funnels for information. And this is something that tech companies have been doing for 20 years. Remove the middle managers, put the decision makers as close to the decision as possible and empower people with the autonomy they need to do great work. And I think that's a naturally comes as a byproduct of asynchronous work and it comes as when you trust your people to work remotely.

• 24:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And so what it feels like at this point is there's kind of three things happening. One, everyone's going to go remote to some degree. There's very variations of severity, but everyone's going to be remote. Two is there is overwhelming data that this is positive for the company, for the product, for output, for happiness, for the worker, for compensation. I mean, just like across the board, this is a positive trend. And the third thing is that everyone is getting the crash course in how to do this effectively. So everything from the chair I sit in to standing desks to how I can make sure my Hands don't hurt because I'm typing so much, all the way down to literally how do we document

• 25:29Anthony Pompliano?

  things, take notes, run meetings, all that kind of stuff. And so where do you feel like the, maybe the biggest pain points are, or the areas where you're saying, look, as teams go to transition, this is where we think they're going to get caught up, or they may kind of falter, or misstep?

• 25:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think broadly, what I would describe as the biggest pain point is the infrastructure. So I think largely you look at the software tools that exist to enable remote work today. We've got the communication tools, we've got the collaboration tools, we've got the documentation tools. So whether you use some variation of Slack, Google Hangouts, Twist, you've got Zoom, you've got all these tools that everyone already uses. They've been in existence for five to 10 years, and they were a necessary first step. Without them, you just can't work remotely efficiently or effectively because you can't collaborate and work together when you need to. The other side to that point is what we would say is the dirty, dusty, boring, infrastructure side, which is how do you enable organizations to

• 26:32Speaker 03

  click a button and take care of all those processes on the backend? So as you start to go internationally remote, how do you take care of cross-border payments, compliance, taxation, insurance, those types of things? As you go more remote and you've got issues around materials, equipment, tools, how can you click a button and no matter where that person lives in the world, they're going to get everything that they require in a box? How do we get everything that we need as an organization set up at the touch of a button? So it's like in the crypto world, right? You build all the rails that things run on top of, many interesting stuff comes after. I think we're at the same place as we were with Web 1.0 or smartphones in 2008 is probably a better example, where we're just beginning

• 27:17Speaker 03

  to build the infrastructure. We're going to see more innovation in the workspace and the workplace in the next three years than we see in the prior third.

• 27:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. What's your message to the remote worker, right? So the person who's now starting to do this, what should they be aware of in terms of whether they're negotiating salaries with employers, getting themselves set up, kind of in their own version of a home office? Like, how do you have that conversation with them? We've talked a lot about the companies, but what about the actual remote worker?

• 27:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's really about trying to change the lifestyle from living around work to working in your life. So, one, how do we get set up so that we can prevent against those injuries? That's a relatively straightforward path. The second part that you're beginning to see conversations around is, should people be paid by where they live, rather than for the skills that they've got? So, what you're starting to see is, well, you are living in San Francisco, you go and live in Colorado, or wherever, we're going to deduct your wage by 20%. And my response to that is, well, I'm doing the same job. Why should you care where I live? Like, I can live wherever I want. So I think we're going to see a reaction against that.

• 28:29Speaker 03

  I think generally, we may see salaries in big cities fall, because the cost of living reduces. I think the willingness for companies to subsidize the cost of living there is going to recede. But what we'll see happen is, in places like Tulsa, or Columbus, Ohio, average wages are going to rise significantly, because they've decentralized opportunity.

• 28:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And in terms of, kind of, the offering that you guys have at FirstBase, what is, like, the most popular part that people are coming to you for?

• 29:00Speaker 03

  Probably, there's three things. So number one is the IT infrastructure. How can we make sure that everyone has the right machine, with the right software and security installed? The second part is, how can we then make sure there is safe, comfortable, and productive at home as there would be in an office? So, desks, chairs, headsets, other peripherals. And then number three, which we're seeing companies coming to us now that they've got those first two things sorted out, is around ongoing culture and experience. So, things like coffee machines, monthly coffee bean subscriptions. One of the biggest financial institutions on the planet asked that we could do Peloton bikes. So, there's a really varied and exciting range of things that people are thinking about

• 29:41Speaker 03

  to say, "We've provided all this great stuff in the office, so restaurants, masseuses, childcare. How can we take that and make the remote work experience equal, if not even better than that?"

• 29:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. In terms of, kind of, where people can find you on the internet, or find out more about FirstBase, where should we send them?

• 30:02Speaker 03

  And for first base, firstbasehq.com, me, Chris underscore heard on Twitter.

• 30:07Anthony Pompliano?

  You're, you're, you're killing it, my friend. Before I let you go, I ask the same two questions to everybody and then you'll get to ask me one to wrap up. The first question is, what is the most important book you've ever read?

• 30:17Speaker 03

  Oh, good question. I, I, I always go back and I've read this multiple times. It's Ender's Game.

• 30:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Ooh, that's a good one. Why do you like that one?

• 30:26Speaker 03

  I don't know. I mean, I've read, I don't know, a few hundred books over the last few years, but it's the thing that I consistently come back to because I think it teaches you to be relentless and when things need to be sort of taken care of to take care of.

• 30:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Second question is a little bit more fun. Aliens believer or non believer?

• 30:46Speaker 03

  Uh, they've got to exist, right?

• 30:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Why do you think that? I agree with you, but why you think, why do you think?

• 30:52Speaker 03

  I, I think when you just begin to consider the vast expanse of the universe, it's inevitable that there are other things out there, aliens or otherwise.

• 31:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. You could ask me one question to wrap up. What do you got for me?

• 31:06Speaker 03

  Bitcoin 2022, how much is it worth?

• 31:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Ooh, 2022. People usually ask me 2021, uh, and that hits her a lot. 2022, I think it's going to be crashing in price. Big run up in 2021, big crash in 2022. So hard to tell exactly where, but, uh, we'll, we'll see what happens.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  Awesome.

• 31:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Before I let you go also, uh, anybody who comes on wearing a black hoodie is immediately a fan favorite. So, uh, I appreciate your fashion choices as well. All right, Chris, listen, thank you so much for doing this. I think people are really going to enjoy this one and we'll have to do it again in the future.

• 31:41Speaker 03

  Awesome. Appreciate your time.