 Thank you. Hi, everyone. Thanks for having us today. I'm going to make sure I have my notes all ready to go. So I'm Jen Wolfe, and I'll introduce, tell you a little bit about Tracy here, and then she's going to tell you about her company Tiger Eye. And then we're going to get into the topic at hand, which is how to set up great companies and how to deal with being remote and build a great culture and everything from there. So Initialize, as I said, is a seed stage venture capital firm. We've invested in Tracy twice, once when she was the CEO and founder of PlanGrid, which was acquired by Autodesk several years ago. And then she was a visiting partner at Y Combinator for a while. And then she decided to start Tiger Eye, which Initialize funded as well. And she's sort of done everything from starting a really early-stage company to growing it to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. So she's got some great lessons from that experience. And we're excited to share them with you today. So thanks, Tracy, for joining us. Why don't you start out and just tell everybody a little bit about Tiger Eye and what it is? Hi, everyone. My name is Tracy. I am the CEO and co-founder of Tiger Eye. Tiger Eye is actually still in stealth. We're launching early next year. But what I can tell you is that Tiger Eye is a go-to-market platform that helps you track and predict the future performance of your business. I'm so happy to be here in Finland. It's my first time. I haven't been to Europe in a long time. We've been working closely with American companies on building out our platform. And we haven't shown any European founders or operators yet. And so if you are a founder or go-to-market leader and you would like a sneak peek before we launch, please DM me. I'd love to give you a demo. Awesome. So we're here to talk about the advantages of building a company with distributed teams and a lot about how remote work works and how to really build a healthy culture. So I can't totally see everybody, but we kind of want to do a hand raise here to see how many people either work for or lead a company that's totally remote or maybe just a little bit hybrid. Looks like a fair number, but not everyone's totally convinced. So we should have a good conversation today. So also, not only is Tracy a little talk about the tiger eyesight, but initialized is also a hybrid approach as a VC firm, which I think is probably a little bit unusual, at least in the US. And we do have offices in San Francisco and New York, but we kind of let people live wherever they are within the certain set of time zones. And we also work on a lot of cultures. So I think we'll have a really great conversation today. So let's talk about distributed work. Actually, when you were at a planned grid, I met with your head of design, and I went and visited your office, had an amazing, beautiful physical space there, and now tigerized completely remote. And you've taken a really strong stance in favor of that. So maybe what are some of the benefits from your point of view on having a ROTE team and going with that approach this time around? So I've had the privilege to run one startup for nearly 10 years with a beautiful office. We had 30,000 square foot of office space out of San Francisco, and now I have the small startup that's completely remote. And I will say that there are trade-offs to being remote, but for us, the positives outweigh the negatives. And there's two positives that come to mind. We want to, as startups, recruit the best talent possible, and remote gives us a competitive advantage against bigger companies that are pushing their workforce to go back into the office. I believe that the best talented people want flexibility, they want work-life balance, they know how good they are, they can get their work done, they can take care of their families, and they can work from home and do a great job. And so that's one. Recruiting great people is one. Two is the cost. Our office space, all in space, was, let's say, anywhere between 10% to 15% of total spend per year. So not only to rent the space, but to get security and a cleaner and stock it with good snacks and have lunch, et cetera, et cetera, 10% to 15% of what we invested every year went straight to our office space. Today, we still meet in person every month, so we have T and E costs, travel costs, but it's only three to 5% on a given month. And we can take the delta and invest it back into the company in product development and in salaries. But there's lots of benefits, of course. Yeah, I think when I speak with a lot of our portfolio founders about it, I think, you know, the sort of the hype around being a founder is like, you're grinding all the time and you're sort of, you're just working around the clock, but I actually think people are more productive and they have better work-life balance. And maybe you can speak a little bit about that. Maybe for you personally, I know you have kids and a family or I think sort of being able to balance that out actually makes people more productive as well. I have three kids, five and under, and I can tell you that I would not be able to do what I do if I had to commute to and work out of an office all day long every single day. And this is true for my incredibly talented team members who are either parents or they have aging grandmothers, grandfathers, and mothers and fathers that they are responsible for it. And, you know, as a good child, they're taking care of, so they have elder care duties. And especially in the U.S. where we don't have the support structure that many of the European countries do. So that falls on, you know, it falls on the workforce to both work and take care of children and their families. And look, my team members get to take care of their families and they're producing good work for us. And it works because we have six hours of time where we overlap, everyone's in different places, but we work together in the same six hours so we could get problems solved together. And then there's two or three hours during the day where it's completely flexible. For me, my kids, one of my kids is up by five and I give him some food and I'm on my computer. For my other teammate, he's a night owl and he might be on his computer from midnight to 2 a.m. I don't care as long as work gets done and we make progress in the company. So it allows me to have that flexibility. Yeah, that's amazing. And I think it also lets you really build a very diverse team of people with different ideas and different ways of working and they can really bring that into the product as well. That's such a good point, Jen. In the U.S., and I think this is true for many countries, COVID hit our women in the workforce. Millions of women exited the workforce during the pandemic to take care of their families, many of which have not returned back to work in the U.S. So I'm all for a building a strong economy and the only way we're gonna build a strong economy is that 50% of the population is contributing and working and paying taxes. And I think remote work is one way to help out. Yeah. So let's talk about maybe the reasons some people state that they might be against remote work. I think a lot of times there's a Microsoft survey I think you've referenced in some of your writings that 85% of leaders say they don't know if they can trust their team to work remote and that's something that's why they kinda wanna monitor what they're doing in an office. And maybe you can talk about how are you assessing if people are getting things done, how do you build that trust with your team so that remote... Yeah, one of the biggest fears of remote work is that people aren't actually working. They're watching Netflix all day. Or the other fear is they are double timing you or triple timing you, they're actually not just an average engineer, they're just working three jobs and you wouldn't know. So there has to be a lot of trust. And you said that word earlier, it's one of our core values. But for companies to say that, look, it's mandatory. You have to show up in the office. What you're signaling to the team is I don't even trust you to work. Can you imagine that? I don't wanna work for anyone that doesn't trust me. And I don't think any of you guys would either or your team. And so it's just really important for us to understand that. And I will say that after just being in business as a founder as a leader for 12 years now, the best managers that I have worked with know exactly what their teams are doing. They know exactly how much work their teams are producing regardless of where they're sitting in the world. That the best managers already know how to hire and fire and manage the best and worst people, manage the worst people out. And they don't need to be watching their every move inside an office. And the challenge with I think bigger companies is you have dozens of layers of management and most of them are very mediocre. And so this is why they're forcing their workforce back into the office. And you mentioned some of the pieces that you, some of the processes you have in place like the flexible work time. Maybe you can talk about also how you guys measure performance. I know you have the show and tell and some of those other tools as well. Okay, so like tactically what we do. Okay, so I talked about flexible work hours. It's really important that we have overlapping hours because there's real work that we have to do. Everyone that is on our team is an excellent communicator. So much of our jobs as founders and as operators is to communicate the vision and the plan so that everyone knows what everyone is doing so that we don't overstep each other. And so communicating not just verbally but written communication. We have an incredibly, we have an insanely organized G Drive which is our company Wiki where everyone can find everything easily. And it does require a very OCD G Drive cop which is my co-founder and CTO. Like he is the police for that drive. You are not allowed to dump any garbage in there or file things away. Like everything is organized, everything is exactly where it is and you can find it. So that's another tactically what we do. I'd like to see his closet at home. You need someone to enforce it. And then the other things that work for us is a regular cadence of meetings which I'm sure you guys have that too. For us there's two really important meetings. All hands is Monday morning. We have all hands every week. Everyone knows we're trying to accomplish this quarter, this month, this week. By Thursday evening we have another touch point. We have a meeting called Show and Tell. Show and Tell is exactly what it sounds like. You show off what you have built even if the thing doesn't work. You show it off or if you're not on the R&D team you tell about what you've built and how you've helped the company progress. And if you are the person that has been silent week over week at Show and Tell, everyone on the team, and certainly Tracy is gonna notice, you want to be the teammate that is presenting something awesome at Show and Tell. So this is how we hold each other accountable. And what it gets us is like a weekly velocity of progress. For me it's like we just have to get 1% better every single day. I don't care what it is, whether it's our product, whether it's the way we service our customers, whether it's our processes, if we are able to get better 1% every single day we will be able to win. We will run faster than everyone. So I think a lot of the ideas you're talking about are touching on company culture and how that's really an important aspect of how you set things up early on, especially when you're remote. Maybe you can talk about from your past experience what made you kind of realize that setting up the culture, the values, that set of things early on was important. Yeah, well I made the mistake of setting up core values that no one knew what they were. I mean we had good enough core values, like one of them was no assholes. Actually HR came in at some point and they were like, you can't use that word, it's no jerks. So clearly, like everyone can agree, no jerks is a good core value. It's nice and simple and we don't wanna work with jerks. Okay, except that we had jerks in the building and I didn't fire them. And what that signaled to the company was, hey, if you just perform for Tracy you can get away with murder. And oh yeah, by the way, the other four core values, that's all bullshit, no one cares about that either. So you don't have to follow any of them. And in the end, you know, Planger had an amazing outcome for all our investors and everyone involved. But we were number two in the market. We sold to Autodesk and the reality is there's no more Planger today, it is dead. There's some merged together product that's still being sold, but there's no more Planger today. And I really believe that if we had the right people in the building with shared aligned core values, we could have been legendary. So that is the promise for our current company. What if we just had the best team and we had shared core values that we all believed in and we all lived by, could we build a better company? And that's where we're at today. Do you wanna hear about my core values? Yes, I have them here too. Do you want me to read them off to you or do you have them all there? No, no, I know my core values. So the first core value at Tiger Eye is whole-heartedness. What the hell does that mean? Whole-heartedness. I have three young kids in the state somewhere. They're with their grandparents and dad. I am here with you at Slush, speaking to you. I'm with Jen here on the stage right now. I am really not thinking about them. When I go home on Friday morning, I'm gonna be with my kids and I will not be thinking about Slush or any of you guys, maybe only telling stories. So the idea of whole-heartedness is it is the antidote to being overwhelmed. It is the antidote to feeling burnout, which is what many of us in startups feel constantly, the constant pressure, the constant stress and anxiety. One way to counteract that is just to be present in the one thing you're doing right now. And we practice this every single day at Tiger Eye at work and in our personal lives. And I expect this of every single person in the company that when they are at Tiger Eye, bring 100% of yourself. Don't split yourself into multiple directions. When you're with your family, eat dinner with your family. Don't check Slack, don't talk to me, don't talk to anyone, don't think about the company. Just have dinner with your family and be with them. That's what whole-heartedness is. And for the interest of time or other four core values is humility, humble people are great to work with. We are all experts at something and we are amateurs at literally everything else. Trust, we've already touched on the importance of trust. Without trust, you have nothing. Simplicity is core to our product, it's core to our processes. We want to see simplicity in everything we do. If we can onboard our customers in a few steps, why make it 15 steps? And our last core value is Kaizen, the Japanese philosophy that stands for continuous improvement. In fact, this is so used at our company that when we show each other something that just isn't quite that good yet, we'll say, that's okay, we can ship it, but we'll Kaizen it immediately. And so everything is always, we'll just Kaizen it. Let's just ship it. There's Kaizen, or when we think something really sucks, we won't say it sucks, of course, because that's not nice. We'll say, ah, there should be Kaizen moments here. Let's talk about how to improve this. And as founders, what we want to see is decisions being made from the core values. Yeah, I really like how those core values are very specific to how you guys do things, because a lot of times when we're advising portfolio founders, they'll say, hey, I have some words that I want to kind of throw out there, but they can't implement them, so I think that's super helpful. I think the last part that's very practical for people is I know you guys have sort of a agreement that you have employees make with one another and with yourself, and maybe you can tell everybody a little bit about that, because I think it's super interesting. I love our 10 commitments to each other, and everyone has to agree to it when they join the company. So the 10 commitments to each other is just clarifying our core values, because they're written in the way where it's like, wait, what does Kaizen really mean? What does simplicity really mean? And there's statements, so I'll give you a couple examples, our 10 commitments to each other. One of them is, I will walk it like I talk it. Or another one, I will never speak destructively behind my teammates back. If I have an issue, I will talk to you directly and trust that I can have the hard conversations and we can work things through, like adults and the professionals that we are. So those are just two examples of where it is very clear what is expected of you to follow our core values, because if you do not behave that way and the last commitment is, if my teammates don't live up to these core values and these commitments, I will let them know. Or if I, in return, are not living up to these commitments that we've promised each other, this is how we're gonna work, I expect you to tell me and point it out. And they sign it. Okay. I think we'll just quickly go to scaling teams and the hiring and maybe the necessary evil of firing sometimes. I think how do you, how do you, maybe what's your best tips for hiring the right people in the organization, especially since you're remote and knowing if they fit in with the culture and the guys? I love the Jim Collins motto of right people on the bus, wrong people off the bus. But I think where we failed in the past is, we knew, and these were probably the biggest mistakes I've ever made, we knew in our gut, we knew in our stomach that this person just isn't gonna work out for a variety of reasons. But we didn't have the courage to fire them because we knew it was hard. Or I remember I would justify, it's like, I know this person isn't working out, but my life is so stressful right now and I just, you know, it'd just be better if my life would just be better if there's just in that seat so I don't have to have a shittier life and take over that entire department. And so I think the advice I would have here is actually how to fire someone. Because I think you all know in your gut when someone doesn't work out. Just like listen to this, there's so much intelligence here. This has taken me 10 years to learn how to fire so I will tell you how to do it. You get them in a room, you look at them eye to eye, if you're remote you try to get them in person because it's the nice thing to do. And you say, these are the expectations of the job. And you really have to clearly say, and you are not meeting these expectations. You can either fire them in the spot, I think it's really important that we try to give people a chance. I think even if you know it's not gonna work out, everyone deserves a chance. So you say, this is how you can fix it. Talk to them about it, listen. It's really important to listen. And you tell them you have three weeks, you have four weeks, you have a generous amount of time to turn it around. And what I have found is that once you have that hard conversation, only 10% will turn it around, 90% you'll realize quickly will completely check out because they're interviewing, they're talking to recruiters, they're interviewing somewhere else. And it's usually because they've lost faith in you, they lost faith in the company or they've lost faith in themselves. So it's just not gonna work out. The other 10% where it works out, you just see them feeling really disappointed themselves and they just bring it. They do everything they can to fix their mistakes or to be, to grow, to remove themselves away from their own ego and then just be a better teammate for the company. And it's really important for the teammates that actually do that for the company to without, with humility, take that kind of feedback and grow and change. It's really, really important that we reward them and thank them. I think it really goes back to the core values you're talking about. It really mirrored in that approach as well because it's sort of having that direct communication with someone and I do think I find people want to be nice or they want to avoid conflict and it is very easy to beat around the bush and not be very clear about what the expectation is or what the person should do. And I think your examples here are a very good way to say, here's how to have clear communication be very direct and still find people who are very humble and hardworking and can turn it around. So I think that's a really great example of applying your core values to how you do things. All right, in the interest of time we're going to the lightning round. So why did you decide to become a founder in the first place versus sort of continue to work in another company or finding a job and kind of sticking with it for a long time where someone else was the founder? I was a construction engineer by trade. I built Plangerd as a fun project with my friends and so I think we benefited from that. There was no expectations. It was just something we could do together. We loved, we were all builders. I was a construction engineer. My friends were software engineers. We just wanted to build something cool that I could use in the field. And then we made our first million dollars and then we made our next 10 million dollars. And I think at that point I was like, whoa, we can build a big company out of this. This product's really good. People are paying us money for it. And we eventually grew that to 100 million in ARR and that's when I stepped down as CEO and handed over to the Autodesk team. But why do I continue doing this? I tried being a VC. It is a very hard job. It is truly a very hard job. Having to meet so many people. It's fun, but some of the painful parts, yeah. Having to be really friendly to founders that you might not even like. To know if you did a good job or not and it's gonna take 10 years for you to know that. I'm a founder at heart, I'm a builder at heart. It's very rewarding for me to actually work and then see progress every single day. That's awesome. Let's go to the last question, which is what's your final advice to founders or sort of your parting thoughts that you would give to anyone here who is a founder thinking of being a founder going through that journey right now? Being a founder, working in startups, being investor, it is fast paced and it is hard. There's product market fit problems, there is competition. But what makes it hard also is that life doesn't stop just because you're doing the hardest thing you've ever done before. We all have to deal with aging and sickness and death. We're all gonna die. That is the one common thing that all of us have. And this was true for us. One of my co-founders at my last company died at 29 years old while we were building our startup in the early days from cancer. And this is the best gift I have ever been given. It is a gift that I think about every single day and it is a gift that I'm gonna share with you that I hope you will take something from. Antoine told me before he died, life is short, life is short, take care of the ones you love. You okay? I would say normalize crying, normalize crying, I would like to say. It's actually really good, so I really need to spit this out because I'm out of time. Life is short, take care of the ones you love, don't be afraid to try new things and never ever do anything that makes you unhappy. Thank you. Amazing. Amazing. Amazing. Thanks everybody.